


Held Against Your Bones

by Dayadhvam



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Mind Games, Original Character(s), POV Dean Winchester, Sam is always present even when he's not, Unresolved Romantic Tension, imagery of Hell, tense changes between scenes for a reason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-25
Updated: 2010-11-25
Packaged: 2017-12-27 05:38:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayadhvam/pseuds/Dayadhvam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-S5 AU. After Stull Cemetery, Dean finds himself with an angel in his head for unsolicited company. It’s a time to tie up loose ends and run into acquaintances old and new, but Dean isn’t finished with Hell just yet, and Castiel’s trapped without a body of his own. (And someone’s got a wild card left to play.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a 2010 fic exchange @ the deancastiel LJ community. Title is from Mary Oliver's "[In Blackwater Woods](http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/127409.html)." Thanks to kalliel for looking over this.

He’s rolled the window halfway down so the wind whips at his face without restraint, but he keeps his eyes open against the onslaught. At the next turn in the road, the afternoon sunlight angles again through the windshield, bright fingers sliding here and there with the curving motion of the car. It chases out shadows in crevices, pools upon the dashboard, flashes along the sideview mirrors. Under its touch the Impala gleams brightly, shiny dark like a cockroach shell.

“Gonna be coming into Pontiac soon,” he says; doesn’t turn his head to look at the shotgun seat. “Make a stop there, get some food. Before, you know.”

The emptiness sits beside him and agrees, as much as any expected silence can. Dean drives onward, and blinks; the wind has dried out his eyes.

*

That night Dean drove back to Sioux Falls. The weight of the Horsemen’s linked rings rested light and insubstantial in his pocket; in the rearview mirror, he could see Bobby in the back seat, getting stiffer and colder by the hour. On Bobby’s stomach rested the license plate of his truck, which had carried him to the cemetery and to his death and which even now languished plateless and hidden.

His left eye had swollen up and he had trouble staying on the right side of the yellow line, the one road law he remembered to follow. The blood on his face had dried and crusted over but he didn’t bother wasting holy water to wash it off. As for the stop signs, the lights, and the turns of his driving—he carried the memories like water in his hands but they fell through the cracks and seeped away, except for Sam, and Sam alone, next to him. His face was brighter than any road signal glaring out of the dark.

( _I tried to help where I could_ , Cas told him much later, _otherwise you might have crashed_ ; and Dean snapped back, _So what? If it happens, who cares?_ and then he woke up to the empty room and scowled and said out loud, “Oh fuck you.”)

At sunrise he took Bobby some ways from the salvage yard and sent him off. The body burned well, for he had spent plenty of time learning how to work with fire and flesh and the illusions of such in Hell, in the proper fashion, and then some with remains of the ghostly dead on earth, and so did not flinch at the smell. Instead he slid his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and slouched forward and watched Bobby go up in flames; thought of Bobby walking up and down the stairs all that one long night in another lifetime, each deliberate step, pressing down hard on the creaking wood to sense the pressure shift from heel to ball of foot, the wondering look on his face.

It had been a long night.

Back in the house, he found beer lined up in the fridge and drank it all, though it tasted like shit in his mouth, and then like blood after he bit down hard on his tongue; fell asleep on the floor of the living room, hunched up against the couch and wearing one of Sam’s old hoodies he’d found under the backseat of the Impala. The threadbare fabric was soft against his skin, the familiar scent still lingering where he buried his nose.

He dreamed of Sam, before the growth spurt had made him so tall. Like trees rooted deep in the loamy earth they stood, side by side, and shot at cans on barrels, which tumbled down to the ground in muffled clinks. They never ran out of bullets and their targets returned to sit on the barrels no matter how many times their shots hit home, so they kept hunting the cans, and more cans, and saw no end. Grass stains decorated Sam’s jeans; dirt also, on his left cheek. And so they stood there and the sunlight drew around them like a shroud.

Sam yawned and stretched, raising his hands up as if his palms could act as his eyes and see the world from the heights he would attain, reaching for the sky; his hair flopped into his scrunched up face, so Dean bent down and shoved his little brother’s bangs back. “Aw, Sammy,” he said. “Oughta cut your hair. At this rate your hair’s gonna be long enough for pigtails.”

Sam scowled and carefully wrapped his fingers around Dean’s wrist. “Dean, you promised,” he said, his voice plaintive and firm. “You promised.”

“I know I did,” Dean told him. “I’m gonna go to Lisa’s, I promise. But you and Adam, and Bobby and Cas—” He didn’t bother to spend energy to continue, focusing on his brother’s jawline, his eyes, his ears peeking out under too-long hair. Dean didn’t know how many pictures of Sam he had. Not enough.

Sam’s smile flickered, gutted out, as if a puppeteer was tweaking his facial muscles for shits and giggles, and a growing whine pressed down on them, high-pitched shrieking like a chorus of crickets all at once. _Dean_ , they chattered at him. _Dean._

He flinched. Then he sagged and snorted and kept his eyes on Sam, whose features had softened, his edges blurring. Sam didn’t look so much like Sam anymore, and didn’t even try. Lucifer repeated, “You promised,” through the roar of _Dean, listen to me, Dean_ and his lips shaped the words earnestly.

“If I ever go to Heaven again there’s no way I’m sticking around to hear your goddamn angel choirs, Cas,” he said to the air, turning his eyes away from Lucifer—and then he was sitting in the cemetery again. Sam was not there. Was still not there. Somewhere behind him, he knew, lay Bobby with his neck at too unnatural an angle to be living, and even farther off was Castiel, splattered as a careless design of blood on the ground, a burst star. He pressed his knuckles to his eyelids and dragged them down his face, digging in deeply as if to knock against his bones. Tap tap, and a hollow echo answered back. “No,” he said. “You’re all gone, okay, right?” He breathed in sharply, a dull pain in his chest where his ribs still carried Enochian script like a red badge, but of courage or of shame he did not know.

“Dean,” and now it was Cas’s voice, entwined with the low purr of the Impala’s engine revving up at his back—an inexplicable occurrence, as were many things in dreams. “I’m sorry you were left behind. I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“Shut up,” Dean said.

“Unfortunately I—I can’t speak to you directly, it would harm you—”

“Does it look like it makes a difference?” Dean said. “You’re not a proper angel, not anymore, so fuck off. Can’t even sleep without going crazy. Why do I have you talking to me anyway?”

There was a sullen silence. Finally, dream Impala Cas said: “I am here.”

Dean replied flippantly, “Yeah, hijacking my baby, I hear you. Good ride, isn’t she?” His car, the only constant now. He turned to the side, bumping his shoulder against a front tire—the raised handprint on his skin rippled and seethed, shit, it felt like acid was eating away, and oh god—the maggots wriggled into his skin, burrowing through muscle and sinew to the bone and he looked up and focused through the bile rising in his throat; heard, _oh Dean, who’s that a-comin’_ , and, _Dean Winchester is saved_ —

Only him. Only Dean. _This is Hell._

—and woke to sunlight in his eyes, high noon slinging heat through Bobby’s house with childlike relish. He shuddered and rubbed his hands over his face; they came away smeared in tears and hours-old blood.

He stared up at the ceiling; repeated to himself the words, I am here.

The smell of beer still hung in the air, but he was stone-cold sober—not even the slightest hint of a hangover. He said, cautiously: “Cas?”

The walls seemed to bear down upon him, eyed him with bemusement. “Figures,” he muttered, and got up and thought, Yeah, should wash my face. Blood all over.

He’d seen the blood; and yet his muddled thought at the explosion had been, Not dead, not yet. He’ll—he’ll come back. As he had after Raphael, and as he had after the banishing sigil, like a worn-out boomerang, chipped along the edges but unfailing in its return. (Harder to come back from Hell, though. Hell in Lucifer’s cage. So Sammy wasn’t—)

Surely—

The sound of static. The TV crackled to life, its screen awash with innumerable flickering points, a sea of black white gray.

*

“Dude,” Dean says, “what’s gotten into you?”

He doesn’t really need to ask something to which he knows the answer. The words rasp in his throat uncomfortably, the silence unnerving. He’d become too used to a Cas in his dreams in the days after Stull—one who spoke to him with the ring of true conviction in his voice. It was easier when he thought this Cas was just a visitor.

Dean curls his lip. Bleach in the brain, he really needs bleach to scrub it all out.

_Don’t presume to ask_. Castiel speaks curtly; he rarely intends to be kind. The Cas Dean visualizes is a Cas who does not often smile. _Just do what we came here for._

Bad temper much, Dean decides, resentment lining his thoughts; he thins his mouth in a flat line, and cuts the engine. The Impala rumbles into silence on a residential street near an intersection. The houses are all sedate, painted with a limited palette of neutral colors, bracketed in the front by neatly trimmed lawns and clean porches, about as nice as Lisa’s place. This is a shrine to the normal.

He gets out of the car and walks up to one of the houses. His jacket traps heat against his body under the bright August sun, but he only draws it tighter around himself. At the door, on a whim, he stoops down and turns over the doormat to check the back: a devil’s trap, one pentacle overlaid upon another to form the all-too-familiar heptagram, drawn with painstaking care. The characters along the edges have been retouched with Sharpie marker several times over.

_I believe it’s common custom to knock on the door when you want to speak to someone_ , Castiel says. _So knock_.

Dean replaces the doormat in its proper place. “Yeah, well, I guess you’re finally catching up on our human customs,” he replies, and certainly two years ago the shattered glass and the high-pitched whistling hadn’t been half as pleasant a greeting; adds, in a moment of spite, “You wanna try it yourself?” before he rings the doorbell, and does not knock, and thinks to himself, Shut your goddamn mouth, man—no hands, ma, Jimmy Novak’s gone and there’s no hands for knocking; but he can’t take the words back, and isn’t sure he wants to, and he considers, maybe there’s a reason that no one answers. But where’s your god now, huh? Where’s your god?

He peeks through the glass while he waits and tries to ignore Cas, whose presence has grown heavy and cold, like a slug dragging its trail of chilly slime over his collarbone. Nowadays Cas rides roughshod over his consciousness as he tries to collect his strength—vertigo strikes Dean’s dreams when asleep, ticklish sensations crawl between his shoulder blades when driving. Out of some warped sense of propriety, Dean hasn’t jerked off in a week since he finally realized that Cas had been in his mind all along, weak and pissed to Hell—and making Dean increasingly pissed as well. Not a visitor after all, but a fucking tenant. No rent, no by-the-way or by-your-leave, but Dean can’t kick Cas out anyway, not like he thought he could before—dumb of me, Dean thinks, goddamn dumb to think it was him—and he wouldn’t do it, anyway. The way it is, at least he knows Cas is alive. That this is Castiel. He’d rather not know where Cas would go.

(He touches his necklace. Four fingers, none of them his thumb.)

Occasionally Castiel will mutter rapid phrases of Enochian to himself, a litany of syllables chiming like bells interspersed with the harsh snap of curses. “What are you doing?” Dean asks and Cas answers, _Trying to remember_.

Dean never asks what. Cas returns the favor and never asks Dean what, either.

Now Cas stops murmuring incomprehensibly and says, _They aren’t here_. And it’s true. Three, five, six minutes, and no one has come to open the door and let in the man who broke the first seal, the gloriously damned guest of honor.

“Fine,” Dean says. “I guess we can come again later. You wanna double back to the diner, grab pie?” He runs his tongue over dry, cracked lips, thinks, Maybe a drink too.

_You think I can taste it in this form?_

“You can taste my taste of it. Or imagine it, or something.”

Cas says flatly, _I have no taste buds. I wouldn’t taste you, either._

“What the fuck?” Dean almost turns his head, remembers at the last moment that nobody’s looking at him, that it’s all in his head. Doesn’t that sound almost like he ought to be in an asylum, instead of bumming at Lisa’s place. He steps off the porch and heads back toward the Impala. “Missing out, but hate to inform you, Cas, I don’t do guys.”

_I’m not a guy_. Cas sounds offended. _Angels aren’t restricted to categories like that._

“You looked like some poor son of a bitch to me.”

_No, that was Jimmy. You’ve never looked at me. Unless you want to be blinded?_

Cas has learned sarcasm well during his time walking the earth—unless he’s being serious. It’s harder to tell the difference than Dean would’ve thought.

“Cas,” Dean finally says, “you look so fucking bright and fine that unicorns are breeding outta your ass, okay? I’m not going to turn my dirty eyes on that pure shit.”

_You’re incorrect—there are no unicorns in Heaven, only pegasi._

“I’m sorry.” Dean slides back into the front seat and passes his hands over the familiar curve of the wheel, fingers curling one by one. “Your sense of humor sucks.”

_Really. Pegasi have the wings._

“Fuck it all,” Dean says. “Cut it out already.”

_Fine_ , Cas snaps. _You believe what you want._

Dean twists his mouth down savagely and starts up the Impala; thinks, Sam would’ve said yes to pie.

(And he said yes to Lucifer. And you, Dean, you too, almost would’ve said yes too—)

He thinks, Sam would’ve bust a gut mooning over unicorns.

(And Dean Winchester, the righteous man: he doesn’t.)

-

At the diner, he ends up ordering fried chicken. The place does a brisk business: off in the corner some girls are sharing pizza at their table, all wearing t-shirts with number and last name emblazoned on the back, and athletic shorts and all; a kid keeps crying in the booth behind Dean’s seat about his broken crayons while his parents confer furiously over the menu; the waitress who took his order stops at a vacated table to clean up, pressing a hand to her temple, and he sees the drawn, hard look in her eyes, the rigid angles of her body. Muscles lean and curving under freckled skin—Dean could easily follow her lines with the keen edge of a knife, grow some fresh blood blossoms for a prize-winning garden. Her face is a blurred mirror image of his own.

_Is the table so fascinating?_ Cas asks. Dean flicks his eyes up and away from the glossy formica. _Are you so bored you have to bother me?_ he mutters. _I’m surprised you’re going to all this trouble in the first place._

_Just the basics; you already know that. It’s an obligation at the very least._

A terrible courtesy as well, thinks Dean; then again, angels aren’t ones to consider much beyond their duty and obligations. Cas is no longer one hundred percent angel, that’s true, but now that any acknowledgment of his existence is restricted to the space between Dean’s ears, Cas is only more determined to find his absent God and to cling to the remnants of his past nature. He had been almost human for a while, but what’s a few months to a few millennia? _Lucifer razed me to pieces and tried to undo my grace, yet I survived_ , he had told Dean, who snorted and said, “Next time we see Lucifer, that son of a bitch is—“ Curled his hands into fists. Next time, there’d be a next time when he’d yank Sam out, there would be—

And Cas had not spoken of Lucifer, and continued, _That counts for something. God must still be out there._

Dean wants to say, And where’s he in this world? And when you find him, you think he’s gonna snap his fingers and fix everything? When he didn’t before?

But he doesn’t direct these words at Cas. Castiel never met his God throughout all the time he was an angel in Heaven; calls him his Father, but not like any father Dean would ever imagine. Perhaps it is easier to love in one’s absence. Perhaps it is easier to hate.

Dean doesn’t want to burst Cas’s bubble, not yet—is, in his own way, strangely envious of Cas’s desperate faith in God all over again. He is being kind, or cruel, or both.

_I appreciate you taking me here at my request_ , Cas suddenly says. _I know that you hate my forced presence—_

_Can’t be helped_. Yeah, and he hates it even more when Cas starts talking about the situation again. It was easier when Dean only had to deal with this in dreams, but then at that time—a wave of nausea suddenly surges in his throat; he winces, swallows it down until his stomach settles again. _Dude, seriously, not now when other people are around. Maybe it’s no difference to you, but I want to hear myself speak when I talk to people, if possible._

_How very self-absorbed of you_ , Cas observes.

_Hey, I gotta talk to someone like they actually exist outside my head_ , Dean retorts. And who doesn’t have to be so bitchy, he adds as an afterthought.

Times like these, he’s grateful Cas only hears what Dean wants him to hear.

_I hope you don’t think you’re insane to speak with voices in your head. I prefer to think I could exist like that._

_Well_ , Dean says, _you know what they say about delusions of grandeur_ —and then the waitress comes with the plate of fried chicken, a side of mashed potatoes, a beer, and he breaks off to give her a nod and a wink. “You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he says to her. “Bringing a man food when he needs it.”

“Or when he’s a customer ordering,” she replies wryly, but the corners of her lips twitch. Her face smoothes out, forehead losing the creases of concentration-through-headache, and the lines around her eyes crinkle up rather than down. She shifts the plates and drink onto the table, her movements deft and swift. “Betcha say that to every waitress you ever see?”

“You’d win, hands down,” he says, but keeps right on smiling. “I do. But that ain’t saying I don’t mean every word of it.”

“‘S only right that you see the truth of my awesome looks,” she shoots back. “Enjoy the food, handsome. You better like it.”

He raises the beer. “Expect I will,” Dean says to the waitress, who finally smiles outright, turns, and sails off to the next table.

(Dean, says Sam, stop flirting all the time, oh my god, don’t you give me that smirk. Okay, so, look at this article here, there was a suicide in—)

_Dean_ , says Cas, _if you’re that hungry you should just eat and not talk._

_You’re kinda missing the whole point_. Dean tries the potatoes. Smooth, well-mashed, a hint of cream and salt and garlic, and the last one’s a pleasant surprise, since Lisa doesn’t like garlic in her potatoes. He knows the taste of Yukon Gold sliding along his tongue almost immediately, the kind his mother always used. That he can still remember bits and pieces of a life before hunting—this surprises him at times. Thirty-one years old, yet feeling four decades older. He wonders: or maybe he is, depending on how you count the years.

_I forget_ , he says. _Did you ever get to try fried chicken?_

_No._ Castiel makes a sighing noise, and the aches clear out of Dean’s skull, a feather-light brush like wings sliding against his temples before they vanish. Dean nearly turns his cheek into the touch—

And he catches himself mid-movement sharply, edging toward empty air. Fuck, he thinks, at least I had someone to look at before.

Cas goes on, _The burgers though, I remember those._

_Not really something you’d forget easily._ Because yeah, the sight had been damn nauseating. Dean crunches the food in his mouth. The meat’s done just right, not too dry but not too oily either. He drags the crisp skin across his teeth, scraping over his gums. It tastes nothing like human skin.

Dean eats; Castiel doesn’t speak. The kid has stopped his crayon-crying fit and is cheerily telling his parents about art class yesterday in school—“and the teacher said she really liked my snake! She said it was really cool it had so many heads and called it a hydra.”

“Like the one Hercules fought, right?” his mother says.

“Uh huh, and every time you chop one off more grow back!”

Overhead, the ceiling fans hum steadily. The girls in the corner have finished their pizza and get up to leave, traipsing past him in a flurry of blue shirts and athletic bags. They’re all quick in their movements, sharp, young, and he hears one of them laugh unreservedly at some joke. He imagines that in their eyes the world must open like an oyster before them, soft and gleaming and brilliant.

Shit, Dean thinks. When I was their age—well. Seen a lot even back then.

He wipes his hands on a napkin and rolls his knuckles over his brow, then snags another piece of chicken and watches them go out through the door. Their last names proclaiming their presence: Morris, Przezinski, Latimer, Yi, and—

—he stiffens. Cas says, _Oh._ Somehow, even as powerless as he is, that one syllable slices down like a glass shard, leaving behind the regret and the pain.

The last girl must have sensed Dean’s gaze, for she turns and catches sight of him, her face very still with creeping recognition. She says something inaudible to her friends, waves as they head outside; then she comes back, back to the place where Dean sits unmoving, and nods. Smiles, but the line of her mouth is half-hearted and wary.

What Dean had seen first: the letters on the back of her t-shirt.

And Claire Novak says, “I told them you’re an old college friend of my dad’s who visited way back after hearing about his disappearance. I thought it’d be good to catch up, though obviously you were going to come see us anyway.” She pauses, then continues: “Can—May I join you?”

Even now, proper grammar. Dean marvels. How humans cling to the things they know. A small miracle all its own. “Um,” he says. Of course this is the kind of luck a Winchester has. “Yeah, sure, sit down.”

Castiel is silent.

She takes the seat across from him. Her hair is tied up high in a ponytail, swinging back and forth like a dying metronome. She settles her duffel in her lap; splays one hand on the table, examines her nails, and rubs off a little grease. Then she folds her arms and slumps down and watches Dean who watches her, for a long while.

“So,” she finally says, voice low and quiet beneath the buzz of nearby conversation. She flicks a crumb off the table, and continues, “Good to see you again,” as if she’s merely exchanging pleasantries with him like any other. “What’s happening?”

“I went to your house,” he tells her. “But you weren’t there.”

“Just soccer with friends,” she explains. “Mom’s working overtime. To pay the bills, you know. She’ll get home later tonight. Where’s Dad?”

And there’s the question. Just like an arrow homing in on the bullseye.

He puts his piece of half-eaten chicken on the plate; he’s terrible at this sort of talk, wishes Sam were there to say this instead. Sammy, whaddya say, to sugarcoat or not? “So. It’s all over. Your dad’s gone,” he says.

Everything remains much the same, except the shadowed ripple across Claire’s face, her cheeks sunken and her eyes burning with a terrible light—in that split-second she does not look at all like the girl who had just laughed with friends, with the world. The sharp lines of her face are sanded down by stress and the agony of known ignorance; for a moment, it reminds Dean oddly of Castiel, that frozen snapshot. She has seen that which the world has already offered her: the tearing apart of hearts, and the difficulty in sewing them back together.

“All right.” Claire ducks her head and looks away from Dean. “We sort of thought.” She pauses. “Daddy’s been gone for a long time,” she adds slowly. “And what Castiel said…”

Dean barely hears the hitch in her voice, but it’s there. I said it wrong, he realizes. Not just gone.

“No, not that way. I mean,” Dean stops. “Your dad’s dead. Shit. I’m sorry.” Dropping a bomb like that—and a round of applause for you, great job, Dean-o.

Cas should be talking to the Novaks, tying up loose ends, but instead the angel’s a disembodied, intangible mess hanging with Dean like a limpet. Or maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that Cas isn’t standing in Jimmy’s body for the visual shock. Either way, Jimmy’s still dead.

“My daddy.”

“I never talked to him again,” he blurts out. “I think it was quick.”

_When Raphael tore me apart_ , Cas had said, _I don’t know where I went, much less Jimmy. I was beyond oblivion_ —there he had broken off, and nothing more. It’s just about the most Dean’s ever heard from Cas on his destruction. Chuck’s room, decorated in bloody smithereens, before Cas’s first return—this he hasn’t forgotten.

“My daddy,” Claire says again, the words like a prayer. She slides her hands up her face till the tips of her fingers meet at the bridge of her nose, the skin under her eyes. Her hands point straight up to the sky. Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. “He’s not with Castiel anymore?”

“No,” replies Dean.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay,” and she picks up a napkin, methodically wiping her hands, then her face, turning her head to the window to block herself from the sight of other customers. “That’s all I needed to know.” She folds the napkin in half, in quarters, in eighths; then snatches up a second one, trembling in her grip. “Sorry,” she says. “Can we go now?”

“Yeah,” Dean mumbles. “Sure.” He gets up and throws down some bills—should more than cover the check, and tip for the waitress too, he guesses, hopes she smiles some more. Someone needs to.

Claire draws herself up as if she was never crying, face gone blank and deceptively calm, and they go outside, past the harsh light of the diner’s sign. The evening swallows them up in its dusky gullet, red streaked purple streaked gray in the sky, punctured only by the pale chalky smudge of the moon.

“I’ll drive you home,” he says abruptly. “I, uh, it’s better for me to talk to your mom. Wouldn’t want you to do it.”

Claire laughs, more like a sob, and swings her duffel in time with the rhythm of her legs. “I wouldn’t want to do it either.” She turns her face up to look at him. “What about Castiel?”

“Cas?” Dean keeps walking, no telltale break in his rhythm, but he slows. “Cas can’t really do much of anything right now. He’s, ah... outta commission.”

“So he’s gone, too.” Claire’s eyes slide past him, focusing on a tree branch, a sliver of sky. “I wanted to ask Castiel about stuff, you know. Like, what was special about our blood. What it was like for Daddy, like how it was for me. But I guess it doesn’t really matter. He’s not stuck anymore.” She’s smiling like she means it, even as the tears slip down her cheeks, for in her eyes there’s nothing but naked relief and quiet sorrow, aging like fine wine. “He’s gotten out of it.”

_Cas_ , says Dean, staring at Castiel’s former vessel. _You and the Novaks—_

_He said yes_ , Cas replies.

_So what?_ Dean watches Claire; just the two of them in the parking lot, a man and a girl, saying nothing that could be humanly heard. _You still got some of your angel mojo, enough to be here. What’s keeping you from just nagging her so we don’t have to be stuck like this? Afraid she’s gonna say no forever?_

_Dean_ , Cas says reproachfully. _I don’t have the power. And of course I keep my promises._

_And if you could—what, the promise is the only thing stopping you?_

The breeze brought in by the falling twilight is surprisingly chilly, nipping at the backs of their necks. He waits for a while, then grins bitterly at the quiet.

“Car’s over here,” he says, and Claire hiccups once, replies, “I know, I recognize it.”

“My baby’s one of a kind,” he adds, because it’s easier to talk about his car.

“Yeah. I’d remember your Impala. I rode in it,” she says shortly. And: “It was nice.”

“One thing I can keep that way,” he tells her and gets in, back too straight against his seat. _Cas_ , he grumbles, _cat got your tongue?_

Claire’s still standing. “You can hop in, you know,” he says.

“I’ll—just sit here, then,” she says, and her eyes move haltingly over the entire car before she looks back to Dean. She opens her mouth again, as if to say, And your brother, where is he—

She doesn’t ask, and opens the door to ride shotgun.

_No_ , says Cas, _I understand better, now._

*

He said to the sheriff over the phone, Yeah, if you could just make sure people didn’t snag anything from his place—much appreciated. Thanks. I’ll figure out what to do with his stuff, sometime. I don’t know. Something like that. Forward whoever calls his phones to me. The words clattered around in Dean’s head, like a tower of blocks falling, each knocking against another on the way down.

Jody Mills listened, and hmmed, and said, finally, “All right. Keep it together, Winchester,” and hung up. She hadn’t asked about anything other than Bobby’s cremation, had heard the news with a loud release of breath and refrained from questioning why Dean had left Sioux Falls without talking to her then, why he was calling her from Indiana of all places. Easier over the phone than in person, he figured, and it seemed like Sheriff Mills recognized that as well.

Dean put the phone back on the hook and massaged his temples. A pain to deal with—storing the books on obscure superstitions and legends and the numerous FBI-police-CIA-and-so-forth-labeled phones, going through Bobby’s contacts, finding someone who would be able to take on the resources and wasn’t retired for the most part, like Rufus. The Winchesters had been known among the hunters, but had not known many hunters themselves; Dean regretted it now, the utter disconnection from anyone else who shared the hunting life. Maybe one of them got to meet Mom before, he wondered fleetingly. When she was young. If there was one old enough. Longevity wasn’t so common among the hunters he knew—or at least, among people the Winchesters knew, which also included themselves.

He thought of the books he’d taken from Bobby’s place and stowed away in the back of the Impala. So far, no sign of anything promising, but there had to be a way. It had to exist; or Dean would figure it out, somehow.

“You feeling okay?” Lisa appeared in the doorway. She carried a wrench in one hand and a rag in the other. “Aspirin?”

“Nah,” he said. “You sure you don’t want—“

“No,” she told him firmly. “I can take care of this leaky faucet on my own. You just got here yesterday evening, I’m not going to have you run around doing work.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to sit around, Lisa. I need to do _something_.” His hands shook. Oh hell. He added up the days, then multiplied, then checked. Three on earth. So that’s how long it’s been down there already. Oh hell. He couldn’t do this, to sit and live a life like this. Telling me to make happy with apple pie—Sammy, you are shit at knowing what I’d do. Fuck the pie. When I was gone, you couldn’t have forgotten what it was like for you, what you did—

“What you can do is rest. I don’t know what you’ve been through, and I’m not going to make you tell me, though I wish you would, but—“

Surely, surely he was just being delusional. The TV had been acting up, that was all. The static, though, even the way the electronics had gone haywire on his first night out of the grave—I am here, he had heard, laying against Bobby’s couch, and even though there were such things as lies, he wondered if maybe something was there after all.

“Actually,” he interrupted. “Do you have any sleeping pills?”

Lisa blanched, the expression flashing so quickly over her face that he barely caught it. “And what do you want with them?” she demanded. She kept her eyes fixed on him, her gaze pinning Dean like an ant under a magnifying glass. At a certain angle, he’d start burning, though he couldn’t guess at which body part would go first, like he’d used to back under. Getting rusty in his old age, he really was, and he could do better than this. Alastair would’ve been so fucking disappointed in him.

“Dean, you can’t ask for things like that to use so casually.”

“I know,” he mumbled, unsure if her fear was of him or for him. He’d shown up without any warning, muttering detached one-word answers to her careful queries, till she’d taken him to Ben’s room, absent the kid at a weekend sleepover, and said to him, “Sleep, Dean,” her voice impossibly alien in its simple, unreserved kindness, and hazy through his exhaustion. Or maybe he had already been asleep—but either way, he had heard the words softly dropping into his head: _Sleep, Dean._ He couldn’t remember what it had sounded like, only something low and gentle and smooth before he’d slipped away and sunk into slumber, as into water deep and cool as the night; and had not dreamed, and there but for his silent breathing had lain like the dead.

“I’m just—tired.”

“Tired,” Lisa repeated. “It’s far too early, only two in the afternoon—“

“I want to sleep.” His voice wavered. “Lisa, I’m so fucking tired. And if I just lie down I’ll keep thinking and won’t get away—“

Lisa’s eyes were watchful. “You won’t tell me anything,” she said. “Dean, you were so out of it last night it wasn’t even remotely funny. And for god’s sake, where’s your brother?”

And even after all the past few days, the question still struck him as utterly absurd for a moment. Then he thought, Of course. She noticed. Of course. He opened his mouth, because he could say it, he knew he could, but the words withered to dust in his throat.

Lisa took a long look at his face, unshaven and shattered and sunken-eyed; her gaze shifted, became stricken itself. She murmured, “Never mind. You don’t need to say anything. I’ll get some for you.” And was back within the minute. She grasped his hand and turned it over, her fingers pressing upon his wrist with a firm, solid pressure, upon the fluttering pulse of a vein; hadn’t brought the whole bottle to give to him (and Dean didn’t think about what that was supposed to mean, not at all). Instead, she dropped one little pill into his palm. “Just for now,” she said. “Just this once.”

He looked into Lisa’s face and managed to form his mouth into a smile, grateful but mirthless. “Thanks. You’re just plain awesome,” he told her, and meant it. “You get that faucet fixed soon, yeah?”

She smiled half-heartedly, said, “Do you doubt my skills?” and raised her eyebrows, and led him to the living room couch. “Here you go.”

He swallowed it down without water. Before he closed his eyes, he saw in his blurred vision Lisa leaning down to tuck a thin blanket around him, and the creased lines of worry on her forehead—

—and then he did not open his eyes for a long time. But his eyes saw.

“You heard me,” said Castiel. “So you did believe after all. Your faith isn’t completely lost.”

“Oh fuck,” Dean breathed out, “you really are here. I—I thought—” Then he stopped and couldn’t continue, thinking of the bloody spray of pieces Cas had become.

The smile on Cas’s face was faint in the slow, mocking curl of his mouth. “This,” he gestured at himself, “is just for convenience. I can’t say I really have a body anymore. That’s been taken care of.” He had on the pristine white dress shirt, the loose tie, the trench coat—unwrinkled in appearance, though slightly worn and faded in color as if drenched in wispy shadows. “You were aiming for sleeping pills the entire time, then. Just to talk to me.”

Dean rolled his shoulders, left, right, both down. “Had to see if you were alive,” he said. “So I wasn’t the only one who made it out. Shit, Cas, where have you been this whole time? It’s not like I haven’t been sleeping, you could’ve talked to me properly earlier.”

The angel’s face wiped itself blank. “Trying to survive. I was taken apart and each cell of my body was ravaged to atoms—“

Goddamn, Dean thought, you cheery bastard.

“—but I was still there. I presume,” he added lightly, “I’ve retained something. There’s angel left in me.” He looked around curiously. “Is this the place you want to be?”

In his dream the trees grew thick and dark like weeds around them. Dean leaned against the porch railing of the small, sturdy cabin at the center of a clearing and shoved his hands into his pockets; he watched Cas hungrily, wondering at the sheer audacity of someone else who was also alive, like him, someone who knew of the almost end of the world, the meaning of despair. He wanted to clap his hand to Cas’s shoulder and feel the solidity of his presence, but if he started forward to do so then he might find this was all a dream within a dream, and so he stayed put, lingering at an awkward distance. Cas sat on the steps of the cabin and gazed back levelly, kicking carelessly at pebbles on the ground. They knocked against his shoe but the impacts went noiseless and unheard. Cas didn’t pay any attention to them.

“Not really,” Dean finally said. “It’s empty. We’re the only ones here.”

Cas dipped his head. Tufts of his hair stood up in clumps, ruffled by wind. “Bobby’s in Heaven, you know,” he said. “He had a long life.”

Dean bared his teeth. “That supposed to make me feel better?” he snapped. “It’s no way to go out, getting killed by the devil—and why would you want to go to Heaven anyway.” It wasn’t a question. Dean had been there, done that. Should burn the place down and free the spirits of the dead from their endlessly looping, deceptive existence. At least in Hell you knew where you were. Fucking God, sticking humans between a rock and a hard place, and destiny chasing after the Winchesters even in life. Dean’s eyes burned and tingled at the corners; he said to himself, Gonna be like this till the end of our days, huh, and thought of Lucifer’s cage. No, not this way.

“My thoughts exactly,” Cas said.

Dean blinked and focused on Cas’s face. “What?” he said, surprised. No change that he could see, but Cas had spoken, calm, implacable, like he’d thought about this for ages and ages and knew himself inside and out. None of the wishy-washy God-resenting, God-loving, angel-human melange of confusion Cas had carried around like a ton of bricks. The purity of belief in his words—now that, Dean thought, was something as angelic as could be.

He frowned. _Dean, listen to me, Dean_ , the small voice dying like a footfall, a dissipated sigh.

Cas’s face was shadowed, darkness softening the lines of his jaw. “What?” he said, repeating Dean’s question as his own. “I was forsaken by Heaven, as were you. There’s little left there for either of us.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Dean,” said Cas. “I know what Hell is like.” He turned toward Dean, but his eyes did not look at him, only through him. Dean wondered at what Cas saw: when blazing a path through the dominion of the damned to raise Dean up, how that terrible landscape must have appeared to Castiel the angel he could not even begin to imagine. Hell shaped itself to its inhabitants’ preconceived ideas, so Dean had hung on the rack like a flayed carcass amid his own ideas of his body, his human belief. But what was Hell for angels? What did they feel, or see? Angels without vessels did not have eyes.

Castiel had eyes now. Glazed blue, like marbles studded in plaster. Castiel said, “And you; you know too.”

“Yeah, I do,” Dean snapped. “So what’s your point? How’s knowing that making anyone feel better? ‘Cause—“

“Because Sam is beyond us, for now,” Cas interrupted. Dean stopped short, pain flaring at the base of his neck as if there the words had been etched in flesh. _In Hell, not here, is here, is_ —“Hell’s beyond this plane, just as Heaven is. Time is not the same, and Lucifer’s cage is like none other. It’s stifling. A bath of bitterness and despair. You might have had your free will, but you can’t exert it over anything. You can’t even begin to hope.”

Dean stared at him. Castiel added, simply, “That’s what I learned from Heaven.”

“Why,” said Dean, “can’t you just shut the fuck _up_ sometimes?”

“I only speak the truth.”

“Liar.”

Cas shrugged. “I have no control over what you choose to believe,” he said. “But I know that at the very least, you would never give up on Sam.”

“If I could’ve—“ Dean snarled, clenching his teeth tight and feeling his blood pulse at juncture of jaw and neck—but Cas suddenly stood and strode toward Dean, scuffing the dirt with his shoes; came up silently and rested one hand on Dean’s shoulder, pressing down on the handprint where the skin went chillingly numb under Cas’s touch. The warmth of Cas’s breath fluttered across his cheek, and Dean jerked away. “Dude,” he grumbled. “You should really know about the personal space issue by now.”

Cas didn’t apologize, and looked, instead, politely bemused. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. He reached out his other hand, down to the side—before Dean could fully register the action, he withdrew his hand from the pocket of Dean’s jacket, something dangling, twinkling from his fingers.

Four rings, tarnished in patches here and there, but the dim sunlight of his dreams flashed across metal like the most ephemeral of shooting stars. And Cas said, “You still have this.”


	2. Part 2

“Sandwiches, huh?” he says into the phone. “That sounds good. Yeah, just checked into the motel. How’s everything?”

“Nothing much happening besides the usual. Ben’s a brat about you being away, but don’t worry, I told him you have your own business to take care of and he’s not allowed to whine about it, else no TV on Saturday mornings.” Lisa’s voice comes through like a bell, bright and ringing. Dean misses her and her straightforwardness and her common sense; she dragged him out of bed over and over on the days when he didn’t have the will to get up himself, which in retrospect is a freakishly monumental accomplishment considering all things Dean. “Thanks for calling. It’s good to hear you’re okay. I know I’ve asked you this a million times, but are you sure you can do this by yourself? You were just going to drive to Illinois for an overnight trip—and now you’re in Nebraska?”

“I know, I know.” He can’t see her, but he’s guessing she’s got that skeptical smirk on her face, going, _Really, Dean, do you know, do you?_ She knows he cracks easily under that look. “I got some information about weird stuff going on, and—I just. I just gotta do it.”

“Don’t be defensive now, not like I can do anything about it so far away,” Lisa laughs. “That means I get to eat more of my own muffins since no one’s stealing platefuls of them. But seriously, don’t drop off the radar, okay?”

“Yeah, I promise,” Dean says. “I promised I’d call you if I can wing it.”

“I appreciate that,” Lisa replies. “I just want to know you’re not getting yourself into trouble.”

He flops out on the motel bed. “So maybe I get myself into trouble all the time, but I’m great at getting out of it.”

“Yeah, well.” There’s shuffling on the other end, a bit of clanking—probably putting away plates, Dean thinks; Lisa did say she’d just finished a late lunch. “Just making sure that you keep getting out, that’s all.” Her voice softens.

So maybe he had looked a terrible sight that first night, showing up on her doorstep. His eye hadn’t recovered from the swelling yet. And more, but Dean doesn’t think about it.

He grunts. “Thanks,” he says. “Say hi to Ben for me.”

“I’ll do that. Stay safe. I’ve got my salt, you keep track of yours,” Lisa says, and Dean nods and replies will do and bye, I’ll talk to you later. He slides his phone back into his bag. “All right, Cas,” he says. “Ready to kick some ghostly ass?”

_I don’t understand_ , Cas mutters. _There are other hunters out there. We could_ —

“Look, I have no idea where to start about this whole—thing.” Dean flaps his hands near his head, even though Cas wouldn’t see it. It’s easier to pretend he can.

He flips open a notebook. Powder blue cover with a bluebird design, something he wouldn’t be caught dead in public with, but the first twenty pages or so are filled in with neat, loopy handwriting and pasted cut-outs of articles. “There’s no way I’m leaving my mom by herself,” Claire had said, letting him out of the house. Behind her, in the living room, Amelia Novak continued to look at family photos; she bore the silence like a bloody cross. “But I try to keep track of things. It’s sort of—hard not to ignore them. So if this is helpful…” She pressed the notebook into his hands and tapped the front. “I printed off some news reports from the Internet, if you’re interested. I don’t know if you still do what you do.”

He’d looked at Claire, thought of Lisa and Ben and how he’d nearly set the grill on fire with a jug of ill-placed lighter fluid, how he’d sit at the kitchen table and listen to Ben’s school escapades while stories of the supernatural kept running through his head. If no other hunter went after this—“Yeah, I do,” and he’d squared his shoulders. “Thanks.”

“What’s your number?”

“... you’re sorta young to be asking that, aren’t you?” He hadn’t been able to resist the jibe.

Claire had only rolled her eyes. “I’m not that desperate to hit on guys twice my age. No, for when I find anything else.”

What she found, Dean thinks now, is pretty damn thorough. The ghost of young Fred Edgerton is bitter as fuck and ready to dump on others; the police would definitely agree, if they knew anything about spirits. Three officers have met untimely, outrageously horrific deaths over the past five years—if there’s one thing Edgerton has, it’s a cold, hard knowledge of methods to hurt and kill.

Dean isn’t surprised by any of the ways they went out. He’d been pretty creative, himself. Wonders how creative Lucifer might get down there. Well, Dean allows, pretty fucking much so. Bitch.

_I don’t see why you couldn’t have contacted someone else—_

“I’m not in the loop with hunters, okay?” Dean grumbles. “Bobby didn’t label people in his phone book, so who knows who I’ll be calling, a police contact or the damn plumber. Rufus is all the way over in Vermont, and I’m closer. Plus some of them were gunning for us in the first place. You’re stir-crazy and keep talking about finding God, and ‘course we can’t do that at Lisa’s. And you’re complaining now? You have any ideas where we should go? No, you fucking well don’t. Hunt’s here.”

_Then you should know more people. You’re not the only hunter out there, but you’re the only one who can help me_ , Castiel tells him fervently, and with every word Dean hears the thump in his chest like a drum, beating forever onward, one and one heart only.

He shakes it away, breathes in deeply, kicks off his shoes. Sometimes he thinks Cas has got the hang of things, sort of, and then he says embarrassing shit like this that just hangs over his head and won’t go away. “Since you’re stuck with me, I gotta say I don’t find that an honor at all.”

_Neither do I. My apologies for neglecting to give you a medal._

“At least tell me I scored gold,” Dean smirks, taps a finger against his forehead—and here, Sam would say something like _yeah, in the lame hardass category_ , but Castiel isn’t like Sam and doesn’t leap at the opportunity, maybe doesn’t even notice in the first place. His smirk falters. “But we break this up and it’s all good. Doesn’t mean I can’t deal with hunts on the side. For hanging around Heaven and earth so long, you could wait some more. I don’t like this any more than you do, but hunters ain’t popping out of the ground ready to take care of things.” It’s better than saying that neither of them have a clue to fix this.

He presses a button on the TV remote and the screen blinks on. Some namby-pamby church service comes up—click, a pair of sharks circle each other, before one turns tail and swims away—click, “And the weather for today is sunny, with a high of eighty-two”—click, and a floppy-haired boy looks to the side and says earnestly, like a promise, “I’m not gonna go away, I’ll always be here—“

Dean switches the channel back to sharks, but the afterimage of the boy lingers behind his eyes. “Godawful,” he says, and blinks the memory away. You know, he tells himself, that was some fucking horrible hair, floppy hair. His eyes are dry. “Soap operas are totally messed up.”

_And you’re saying this because?_ Cas sounds rather taken aback.

“They don’t understand anything about what’s going on.” Dean grimaces. “They’re always lying to each other too. ‘Oh no, you just chucked away that scrap of paper! Not important at all, but I’m gonna blow up at you anyway. You piece of shit!’ Then you find out the paper was a diagnosis for fucking cancer and the guy dies, and then his surprise twin comes outta nowhere.”

The answering silence is long, and mildly incredulous. Then Cas says, neutrally, _You seem to be very familiar with certain elements of soap operas._

Dean bristles. “Dude,” he says. “I’ve lived in motels most of my life. I don’t always find good TV programs everywhere.”

_Well_ , mutters Cas. _If you want to see it that way._

He shrugs, and sits back to wait for the cover of night. The sharks on the television thrash about in a feeding frenzy, and blood clouds the water like a roiling storm. “This is so fucked up,” he says to himself.

-

And twelve hours later, he’s screaming the same thing all over again. _I don’t think the ghost likes you very much_ —Cas remarks, dry as toast, and Dean just keeps running, rolling behind a gravestone. “Stop laughing, this ain’t goddamn funny!” he grits out, and cocks his gun. He doesn’t know where his shovel’s gone—when he showed up to the cemetery early-bird-style, Edgerton was already lying in wait. Blurriness seeps into the edges of his vision, and Dean’s not even drunk yet.

A few feet over, the ghost hovers like a vulture. A poor, twitchy boy, accidentally shot by police while holding up a store for money to fund his runaway—and though now dead, dealing out a particular brand of nasty that Dean can’t help but feel sorry for both the kid and the three police officers who happened to be on the scene and suffered the consequences. Each time a different MO—one burned and branded on the kitchen stove, another whipped to death with a garden hose, the last suffocating on ammonia fumes—but Dean looks at the pitiful little stone with the dead boy’s name, remembers reading the clippings on his surviving family members (a drunk abusive father, a sick absent mother) and thinks that, yes, this is how Hell works, all pains which are suffered you visit upon those whom you choose to suffer. Terribly human, or almost so.

_I can try to distract him_ , Cas offers.

“How would you do that?” Dean gasps, rubbing at his temples; as if Cas unconsciously senses his pain, cold sinks into his scalp, a sudden blast that shocks the ache out. He pokes his head around the gravestone, cocks the gun ready, and pulls the trigger. The salt shell blast rips through Fred and he dissipates rapidly, his shriek like a piece of chalk squeaking down a blackboard. Dean winces at the ringing in his ears, says, “He’s not gonna be gone for long.” And where’s the damn shovel?

_I think I could_. Castiel’s voice drops low and gravelly. _It’s inadvisable for you to suffer a concussion, and after—last time—I’m sure I can survive grappling with a mere spirit_. He says it with deadly certainty.

It’s true, Dean thinks. Castiel had kept himself together, even as buried as he was, all that time. All that time, and Dean hadn’t tried to consider his own suspicions—

—so he only replies, “Whatever you say.” He’s got the shovel in hand now, and drives the tip down hard into the ground before levering up dirt; keeps seesawing up and down, in and out, but just a few loads in he feels the hair on his back stand up again—

_He’s coming back_ , Cas says, and suddenly Dean feels him receding, washing away and out of notice like the tides, without fanfare. _You keep digging. Be quick._

“I’ve been hunting long before you hauled your ass to earth, don’t tell me what to do.” Dean’s grip is tight on the handle, knuckles standing out white. Dirt flies past his face, caught up in the momentum of his shoveling.

A flare of warmth kindles in his left shoulder, fleetingly, a curl of bare fingers upon scarred skin that echoes in the pit of his stomach, and then he hears Castiel breathe out, his voice soft and inexorable: _Forgive me_. Behind him, Fred Edgerton starts screaming—holy fuck, he sounds closer than he oughta be, Dean thinks hurriedly, and digs faster.

“No,” Fred sobs, “please, I didn’t mean to break it, I’ll fix it—it doesn’t smell right, I wanna get out, Daddy, let me out—“ He cuts off, choking, gasping. It’s a moment before Dean realizes it sounds like hyperventilation, if ghosts had lungs.

“Cas!” he shouts. “What the hell are you doing?”

_Don’t look!_

Dean can see his shadow in the hole he’s digging, unnaturally white light streaming over his shoulders and pooling upon the ground, deep in the ground. It stretches out large and smoky and amorphous, a demon in its truest form; he sees nothing of himself in it.

“Cas!”

The void opens up sharply in his mind, an abrupt absence. Having his head space to himself—now, Dean’s totally fine with that—but Cas, where’s Cas? He turns just as the light begins to fade—sees it sucked down, dimming in the ghost’s chest till Fred Edgerton’s shaking on the ground, knees bent awkwardly, pale ribs glowing bright as phosphorus, and Cas says, almost babbles, _I couldn’t hold him, Dean, move_ —

Fred snaps his head up, face twisted with rage—the shovel wrenches itself out of Dean’s hands and swivels around to plant the flat of the blade firmly in his stomach.

“Shit!”

He’s knocked right into the hole he was digging, the impact rattling his bones like a marionette’s limbs. No time to grab his gun and salt shells. _Dean_ , Cas is broadcasting like crazy and he certainly doesn’t seem to realize that his words are rocketing around in Dean’s head like someone’s shouting over a loudspeaker— _Dean, you can’t let him trap you here!_

“Stop telling me what the fuck to do!” Dean shouted back, trying to ignore the headache, his fingers scrabbling for purchase in the dirt, grabbing at the edges of the hole as the ground crumbles underneath his grip, and—

He gags and lets go, dirt in his face, dirt down his mouth and it just keeps going down, and now Fred is right in his face. “You can’t keep me down!” His silvery eyes are wide with anger and barely concealed fear; Dean can see a thin scar running along his cheek. “I’m not going down! I’m gonna be good enough and you—can’t— _do_ this to me!” And the ghost keeps trying to shove the entire fucking ground into Dean’s face. Dean is not cut out to eat this shit.

He screws his eyes shut and braces his body against the bottom of the hole; spits blindly at the front and in one quick movement hauls himself back out. He hadn’t been digging very long, though he’d been efficient, and he knows he hasn’t hit the coffin yet. Doesn’t know how much more he needs to dig, and all the while the ghost is still shrieking, kicking up dirt around him and—a jerky tug at his leg, and Dean can’t open his mouth again unless he wants a late night snack of dirt, but there’s no way he’s going to let himself get dragged back down, not now, not again, and he twists sideways, and Cas with him, away and away—

“Allow me,” the night says.

Fred Edgerton’s grave goes up like a bonfire, shooting beyond the gravestone till the entire cemetery is lit up by the impromptu pyre, in a single moment of wild ecstasy—tendrils of flame barely lick at Dean’s jeans, holy shit is it close, he tries to rub them out against the ground—then the blazing red and orange blinks out, like a snuffed candle.

Under the skin, Dean can hear his heart beating, rabbit-quick.

What the fuck. He says weakly, “Cas, what did you do?”

_I tried to connect to him on another plane of existence. Then I showed him his worst memories, to keep him incapacitated as long as I could, but he fought through it and forced me away. He was very determined_. Cas sounds almost admiring. He adds warily, _I didn’t set anything on fire though._

“Oh,” says Dean, squinting into the darkness. His worst memories—and he guesses it makes sense, because if Heaven can cherry-pick your happiest memories it can certainly pick out the worst ones. What a bastard to do it, Castiel, though it got the job done. Maybe in Heaven Fred Edgerton can get away, and won’t go down.

The fire, though.

He sees first the bare feet, then the colorfully patterned cloth of skirt and blouse. Kali melts out of nothingness, the lines of her movements as etchings of shadows made real, accompanied by the smell of smoke. She lowers her left hand, and smiles.

Dean turns on his back; turns on his charm, a flick of the switch, even through the dirt lining the inside of his cheeks and the underside of his tongue. He is so tired, of this life and of this hunt and of these beings who see humanity not as it sees itself. My luck to get all this in one night, he thinks.

“Nice seeing you again, how ya doing?” He keeps his facial muscles rigid, grinning. Last time he’d seen her—roaring away from the Elysian Fields Motel, the three of them sitting in strained silence—ten minutes out, she’d finally stirred from the Impala’s backseat, said coldly, “I will remember you two,” and vanished.

(Shit, Sam had said, pulling a disgruntled look at him. You shouldn’t have hit on her.

Bitch, at least I had the balls to do it.

That was before you knew she could eat you alive, jerk.

If I’m alive by the time she gets around to it, Dean had thought, and the surprising thing about that was that the notion wasn’t even surprising.)

He figures that yeah, she wasn’t gonna forget them so easily. He’s banking on the hope that she remembers them with more indifference than anger. Besides, he wonders, what is she doing here anyway?

_Kalikamata_ , Castiel says. His voice is subdued. _Kalaratri. Hail, adi Mahavidya_. He goes on, but in no words that Dean can recognize. Castiel speaks like he’s singing a war song, drumming out a dance. Blood pumps through Dean’s veins, a strangely pleasant dizziness in his head, of adrenaline and fear and the scathingly free existence of the hunt; here he lives, wind on his face, dirt in his mouth, at the feet of gods, and so he exists with the rhythm of Castiel’s words in his mind, fierce and unyielding and neverending—

Kali bobs her head and taps her feet, and then Cas suddenly stops, stricken.

A shudder runs through Dean’s body, though he doesn’t know why—

—or, maybe, he does. The hazy stupor down under, for there he did not live, carvings on his soul, entrails in his hands, at the feet of torturer and teacher, and so he existed with Alastair’s praise like a drug, lifting him high and giddy.

(But he doesn’t dwell on it.)

_What_ was _that?_ he asks Cas. He sits up, gingerly, his eyes fixed on Kali and his mouth fixed in a smile.

Castiel says, _I cannot go on anymore than that. I_ —his voice cracks briefly, but he goes on as steadily as he can— _I lack the capacity, nowadays._

“No need to exert yourself on my behalf, young messenger,” Kali says carelessly. “I know that you are forgetting words you once knew. I grant you some slack.”

“You can hear Cas?” Dean blurts out automatically, because he’s been the only one for so long—but obviously she had, if she was talking to Cas in the first place, so the question’s damn stupid—and tries not to shrink under her glare.

“Just because we appear to you in the guise of humans doesn’t mean we’re restricted as you are,” Kali comments. She shrugs and runs her hands through her hair, which cascades to her shoulders, thick, dark, unbound, and messy; then she bends down, scoops up dirt, and flicks her tongue along her palms. “It isn’t as disgusting as you think it is,” she murmurs, her eyes watching his mouth. “You have strange conceptions of the world, Dean Winchester.”

“Uh,” Dean says. “Sure, I do.” He shoots a glance behind him, then scrambles to his feet. “Thanks for… helping with the ghost.” He scrapes his tongue over his teeth, spits onto the ground. Maybe his world is strange, but he hasn’t started eating dirt yet. And what Kali wants in return, Dean can’t even begin to guess.

_You’ve met her before?_ Cas asks.

_Not now_ , Dean says hastily. _Later._

“The cremation,” says Kali. “These grounds are favored places of mine.” She steps lightly over to the burnt hole and kicks at the ground—when Dean next blinks, the grave’s completely filled in.

“That’s cool,” Dean mutters carefully. “I—haven’t seen you at a salt ‘n burn before.”

“You did not even think to believe in me before,” Kali returns without resentment, merely stating bald fact, her voice crackling like embers. Her face is nearly akin to the night, barely distinguishable—what shines are her eyes large and bottomless and aflame with unrefined, barely contained explosive glee, and her lips bright red as if painted with pomegranate juice. It’s hard to tell under the washed-out moonlight and the fading starlight. Blood, possibly. “And I don’t always care to come. But I did say I’d remember you, and your brother.”

“My—my brother. Sam.” Dean cuts in sharply, the muscles in his neck taut with apprehension. He’d carried the hope with him for so long, before it had crashed and burned with the reveal of Cas’s true presence, and since then he hasn’t dared, has barely let himself think of his failure, and near-failure once more—yeah, Dean, why don’t you almost screw the world over again, let the devil out again—but right now, here in front of him, a deity who scorned Lucifer the fallen and despised the apocalypse games, who has power—

He looks at Kali, knowing his failure to conceal anything, his want, and oh how desperately he does want. Let me be as selfish as I want to be, for once, he pleads, to an absent God; and says, to Kali, “Do you know how I—“

_Dean_ , says Cas, _don’t_. He sounds pained.

“I would tell you to listen to the messenger, if you’ll have it.” Kali looks like she feels a little sorry for him, but not sorry enough. She runs her tongue along her mouth—licks her lips, not seductively but clinically, as if to inspect taste. “I am hardly familiar enough with your Hell, and care not to bother with your God. If your God wants his creations to learn responsibility, he must begin with himself. And where is he?” She shows her teeth this time when she smiles, bitter and radiant as a star.

Dean isn’t smiling anymore, fake or otherwise.

_That’s what I’m trying to learn_ , Castiel replies. _If I have survived this long, in the face of all that has occurred, I can’t claim that God has abandoned us entirely._

“In the face of all that has occurred?” Kali repeats gently, mockingly. The corners of her mouth are still turned up.

_So it is._

“Ah,” and Kali sighs. “Your faith, now that is admirable. Your lack,” she continues, addressing Dean, “is also.”

She makes a gesture with her right hand, a swift swivel of the wrist, flicking it at some distant point. “There’s an acquaintance of mine, who last I heard is in California,” she says lightly. “If you’re looking for someone who knows a bit about creation, and separation, and might help you. Unfortunately, I don’t have the angel’s blood, and so—“ She holds out both hands now, palms facing up. “If you’re interested.”

“What do you mean?” Dean demands; has given up on bothering to soften his tone, and speaks to her bluntly, bulling straight ahead.

“You can’t possibly want the young one as a hangers-on for the rest of your life, do you?” Kali tosses her head back and laughs. “And you, you can’t want to be stuck, barred from your greatness, forever and ever?”

Castiel says, slow and sure, _I want to be able to find my God, and be of help, and to go where I wish to go. That is all._

Dean clenches his teeth, and feels inexplicably, strangely bereft.

Kali comes to them. She places her hands on the sides of Dean’s face, and the press of her fingers upon skin is rough, gritty, but surprisingly cool. Dean thinks of Kali’s hands, arms raised in attack—thinks of fire pouring forth in the inferno, licking at his neck. “Ask for Papa at Haloa, in Los Angeles. Maybe.” Her breath slides over him, hot but not scalding. Dean hasn’t been burned yet. “Perhaps you’ll find a way.”

“Haloa?”

She lets go and twirls away, back to the grave. “Consider it a boon,” she calls back. “You dared to confront me once before. And at least you agreed to fight against Lucifer, who had such pride to dictate to us all. To _me_. I am beholden to no one.” She curls her lip. At once she seems older, more stark, more disheveled, but carries herself without regard.

The rank air presses down upon Dean. Kali’s voice is laced with acid, cold disdain. “If he came to the land of my rise, he would not hold his head like a brat. Ganesh laughed so hard! Cutting off his head does nothing, he’s so accustomed to it by now. Did Lucifer presume himself to be so high and mighty that we would commit all of ourselves to our avatars? We make our own bodies, we do not take.” She flings out her left hand, slicing through the air so quickly Dean can hear the pitched whine and swish.

And he can’t have been concussed from the fight, but his eyes must be tricking him, a mirror image trembling in his vision, a ghost, a doppelganger demon: two left arms, two left hands, dark and blood-stained. Except one carries a sword, and the other does not, and there’s the smell of sweat and days-old blood, and the decay of flesh. He knows the scent, imbued in his own skin: Hell’s most popular perfume.

Kali says, the curve of her mouth like a bare sliver of the moon: “He never saw me dance.”

Dean shivers. “So?” he replies. He cocks his head back and looks her straight in the eye, unflinching. “You dance pretty fucking well.”

Cas says sharply, sober and wary, _Very_. And he says, _I saw it once. Gabriel was there too. I think that’s why he sought you out, Kali. You would never turn away from nothing._

“So he wanted that which he lacked in himself,” Kali says dismissively.

“Sure,” Dean mumbles, then raises his voice. Now they’re back on ground he knows. Gabriel had been a twisted bastard, but—“But hey, he ended up against Lucifer in the end, you know. That count?”

Kali’s face smoothes out and closes in, like doors shutting in shadow. Her expression is utterly unaffected, cool and blank, but though she looks at Dean she seems to see another face before her. “Perhaps,” she says, her words lilting. “But he gave up too early, before everything. He had no heart to kill his brother.”

From this distance, Dean can barely make Kali out at all, but her eyes gleam bright in the dark, like blazing comets, like sunlight flashing off the cold biting metal of blades. She takes a swinging side-step, shaking out her hair, and—

—there is only empty space.

Dean stares into the night, listening to the thrum of his pulse. Thinks about the worlds out there of which he knows nothing. Fire has charred Fred Edgerton’s gravestone along the sides; he runs a finger down his jaw and feels the stickiness of blood, a thin cut. Then he picks up the shovel; retrieves his gun; turns away from the place where Kali left the sphere of mortal sight, and says, “Cas?”

Cas mutters, haltingly, _Kali isn’t you, Dean. You would not—ever. But it doesn’t mean that you—we haven’t given up._

It doesn’t matter. Not like Crowley has the mojo to help him pull off a raid anyway, even if the demon bothered. Another idea that’s withered and died; Dean’s stopped counting.

“I think we’ve got somewhere we need to be, before someone comes to see about Kali’s crazy flash bomb,” he says instead. “Sunny days in California, Cas, just think. You up for it?”

If Cas had a face, Dean thinks he might nearly look relieved. Yes, Castiel says. _Yes, I am._

*

“So how come you didn’t die again?” He sat on the far corner of the dock—not even on a chair, just cross-legged on the wooden planks, and he felt the smooth grains running parallel against the side of his foot. Somehow, magically, a fishing pole was secured in front of him, though he wasn’t really sure about what it was attached to, and the line trailed in the waters, testing the murky depths. Dean thought, Hope there’s good bait on this thing, and then figured that this was a dream by the almighty fucking Dean Winchester and good bait was an automatic given.

“I’ve already told you before,” said Cas placidly.

“Yeah, I’m not dumb.” Dean tugged at his sleeve.

He heard Cas shift behind him and sigh. The trench coat rustled. “I guess that Lucifer wasn’t thorough enough,” Cas said, “since he had other things which distracted him.” A soft snort, bitter and darkly amused in its tone. “As for me—I didn’t want to die. And the closest thing that grounded me—it was easier to tag onto you, since you’ve known my grace before. It’ll only be for a while, I need time to regain my strength.”

Dean slipped a hand over his left shoulder automatically, but couldn’t feel the raised ridges of the scar through his jacket. Under all the layers of clothing he was unnaturally cold. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s that.” Cas’s words told him nothing new, but there had to be something more he wasn’t saying. Dean couldn’t help but wonder how long Cas would last; every night Cas looked a bit more drained of energy, more pinched around the mouth—sometimes he stayed for only a few minutes before taking his leave. Even his lips looked paler, tinged with blue.

_I just need time to regain my strength_. But angels could lie.

He turned his head and looked up. In his eyes the sunlight flared out around Cas’s head, a dazzling blurred ring, a camera flash gone too long. The prolonged exposure warped his vision; the angel’s face was muted, cast in shadow. “Hey,” he added, and lightly jabbed his elbow into Cas’s shin. “You’ve even got a halo now. First step in angel recovery, you know?”

“I try not to let people be stunned too much by its brilliance.” Cas’s voice was bland as he crouched down, so his face was level with Dean’s. His hand darted out, like a snake lunging for the strike, and the pads of his fingers pressed deeply into the hollow between Dean’s collarbones.

“Fuck!” Dean startled and jerked away from Cas, the pressure vanishing as quickly as it’d come. “Give a guy some warning, would ya? I’m not a goddamn voodoo doll.”

“My apologies,” said Cas. “No pins in the future.” He nodded at Dean, his eyes fixed on Dean’s chest. “So what do you think of it?”

“I think you’re crazy,” Dean replied, but there was no heat in his words—more consideration than condemnation. He snagged the chain he wore around his neck, and four rings clicked against each other. War, Famine, Pestilence, Death. “We can’t just open it all up so demons can get out—“

Cas shook his head. “These are for Lucifer’s cage,” he said. “Not a Hell’s gate to demons. I need the initial set-up of these four linked together—then I can search and point you where to go. In a physical sense, it’s finding a weakness in the cage—when Sam used the rings, that was cracking the cage wide open.”

“How the fuck would you know where—“ Even Azazel hadn’t known the location.

“I got a lock on Lucifer beforehand,” Cas interrupted, chilly and business-like. “I can trace his grace well enough—“

“How’d you do that?” Dean tore his eyes away from Cas and looked down the length of the dock. “And how’d you think of it in the first place?”

The fishing pole trembled, the water rippled. The wind brushed along Dean’s head, tickling like a handful of cattails dragged over his hair, and he heard his name repeated in a mantra, whispery and strained. _Dean, Dean, Dean listen to me._

Cas sighed. “I couldn’t expect that you would succeed,” he said. “Sam—Sam is strong, but Lucifer is Lucifer. And it’s practical to have a failsafe. If necessary, I would’ve tracked him to deal with the damage he would wreak.”

“Wow, thanks for your confidence,” Dean muttered. At the other end of the dock he could barely make out the grass, yellow-brown with drought. 

“It turned out to our advantage in the end. Sam doesn’t deserve to be there. I have faith that you can do it.” And here was the miracle: that Cas sounded like he actually meant it.

Faith that he’d break his promise. Faith that he was weak. Cas didn’t mean for it to come out that way, Dean was sure—and he was weak, he wasn’t denying it, but he couldn’t afford to care. Not now. _In with the devil, jack in the box_ , slurred voice settling lithe and easy upon his ears, and black smoke curled up like a comma mark, a Cheshire grin, _and aren’t you Christmas come early?_

The echo of Alastair’s smile along the line of his mouth, and oh, the pride.

_Good boy._

He heard Cas stepping away from him now, the snap of his heels against wood. “Sure,” Dean said stiffly; thought of Cas saying, _I don’t have the same faith in you that Sam does._ But they’d succeeded in the end, hadn’t they? The hollow victory lodged in his chest like a carved-out shell, but Lucifer was caged and Sam had jumped, he’d chosen to jump. Just like Cas had chosen to turn against the schemes of Heaven. And Dean had chosen…

The air shimmered, the glazed heat of summer in a dream where Dean felt the cold sink through marrow in a way that the warmth of a savage sun could not even hope to conquer. Along the banks of the lake the weeds tangled fiercely with each other—rundown, like a future land he’d once seen, and he imagined Lucifer walking over the ground, shoes squeaky clean upon snapped necks and the buried dead, dressed all in cleanly pressed white like a wraith. The Devil wore his brother’s face, and smiled.

His eyes were terrible in their sincerity. Dean shuddered.

Castiel’s shadow stretched past him and onward, long and distorted like a wicker man burning. If he squinted, he could almost imagine it looked like Sam, more Sam than Jimmy Novak. The shadow turned, a quick shot of Sam’s profile, but its arms began to elongate and stretched toward the edges of the dock, the darkness gathering up and overflowing into the water. Now this was new—hallucinating in a dream, just awesome, Dean thought, and curled his mouth up.

“Dean,” Cas said. “Do you have faith in yourself?”

“Faith’s got nothing to do with it.” Dean snorted. He looked away from the shadow to the shadow maker, and saw that Cas was watching him, blue eyes sharp as an eagle’s, pinning Dean down like prey. Standing there innocuously, drawing himself into his coat.

“I’m just gonna do it,” Dean said. “That’s all.”

The skin at the corners of Cas’s eyes tightened, a touch of crow’s feet. “As you wish.”

The end of Dean’s fishing pole twitched once, twice, before the entire pole started shaking. “Oh shit,” Dean said, and made a swipe for it—“Caught something!”

“We have to act soon.” Cas was fading out—the dock too, and as Dean got to his feet the sunlight glanced off the water again and again, flashing like a strobe light, a whited out police siren. He reached for the fishing pole but it sidled away from his hands—right there, right in front of him, but he still couldn’t grab it properly. “It’ll be easier for me.”

“When?” _And what’s gonna happen to you?_

“It’s up to you, Dean. You choose.”

_Don’t listen, Dean, not_ —

The water fractured into a thousand brilliant pieces, blinding bursts pulsing around him like heartbeats all in unison— _hey Sammy, so how about the fireworks_ , and Sam said, _You promised, Dean, you promised_ , and then he felt the stutter of breath in his throat, the pressure of a hand upon his shoulder, the sear of a branding iron—and here’s the question, _who gripped you tight and raised you from_ —

“Holy crap!” Ben’s voice snapped out of oblivion, a side hit ramming into his head.

He came awake with a gasp and his heart racing like he’d run a marathon. In that first second of wakefulness Dean stared up at the ceiling but with eyes unseeing.

He couldn’t think where he was, couldn’t remember where his arms were, then realized that he was tangled up in his blanket, about to fall off the bed onto the floor. His skin was slick with nervous sweat. But this was normal, a normal bed, in a normal room, and through the open door wafted the smell of Lisa’s special beef casserole. His arms and legs remained intact, neither dislocated nor dismembered entirely, and Sam and Adam and Bobby were gone and Cas was going and all was well. Fuck.

Ben hovered nervously several feet away, his hands held up apologetically. “Shit, Dean, sorry. But it’s past noon. I thought I’d wake you up, though guess you didn’t need my help after all.”

There were no cracks in the ceiling. But cracks in a cage, just one and that’ll be enough, Dean thought. Just one shot.

He threw back the blanket and sat up; shot Ben a smile, crooked and loose. His mouth ached. So he’d promised, but—Sam, and Adam too, both stewing in the cage—he couldn’t let that go. “Hey man,” he said. “Better not let your mom hear that.”

Ben crossed his arms. “I hear Mom saying stuff all the time,” he said, and winked. His attempt to look cool looked more like he’d got something in his eye.

What a kid, Dean thought tiredly, fondly. What a kid. He himself hadn’t felt much like one, after the fire. Nor Sam, worrying about stitches instead of toys.

“For real? I gotta be the one cleaning your mouth out?” He reached out and mussed up Ben’s hair, fingers scoring gentle lines across the scalp, before slicking it back. “There you go, you regular Elvis.”

Ben scowled but he hadn’t tried to duck away from the impromptu hair styling, so Dean figured he was all right in the kid’s books. “Mom says lunch time. And she says if you keep hogging the shower so much she’s gonna start feeding you salad—like, plain lettuce. No dressing or anything. Though,” he added, leaning closer as if drawing Dean into his conspiracy, “I don’t really care much myself.”

“C’mon, you’re just sayin’ that because you want all the real food to yourself,” Dean said. He couldn’t explain it to Lisa, couldn’t imagine how on earth he would say, So I was in Hell for a while, I can still feel it sometimes on my skin, at least before it got ripped off—so instead he kept his mouth closed and would stay under the spray of hot water for half hours at a time. So long underground, it was a wonder he hadn’t smelled worse after being pulled out of Hell, crawling out of the earth like a bewildered newborn. Considerate of Cas to clean him up, really, back when Cas only knew him as the righteous man, and not so much as Dean. The righteous man sounded like someone who was supposed to have everything worked out, kept together. Dean, though—now that only meant Dean, and nothing else. An alien guest in this apple-pie-life home, the first one to break, the only one saved by an angel under the orders of Heaven. Brother without a brother, and o where art thou, who art not in Heaven and all that shit.

He smacked Ben gently in the stomach. “Looks like you’re growing sideways instead of up, Ben,” he said. “No problemo, someone’s gotta help pick up the food slack. I’ll be there in five.”

(Problema, Sam had muttered over the phone. Dude, your Spanish sucks.

Are you seriously gonna whine about my grammar right now? Everyone knows what the hell a problemo is, it’s a goddamn problem! The werewolf’s—

I’m coming! Promise. I’ll be there.)

*

He orders coffee at the Starbucks closest to the university—picks the blackest choice they have, no milk and no sugar, and then he buys another one, a frappuccino with caramel and whipped cream on top. He shoots a quick, rakish grin at the barista, a pretty girl with curly dark hair tied back who looks more startled than flattered. “Thanks,” he says, and turns away from the surprised wariness on her face, a cup in each hand.

He’s a grimy, rough-hewn blur in the mass of sleep-deprived, party-happy, class-ridden, homework-hounded college students. Colorado State’s fucking enormous, and he can’t imagine living in a place with so many people milling and bustling around, minding their own business. Wonders how long it took for Sam to get used to it. _Maybe I really can’t do normal after all_ , he says, _if even a random barista’s gonna be giving me the evil eye. You think?_

_I wouldn’t_. Cas adds, _You aren’t as strange as you could be._

_Yeah, but you’re an angel, and you’re disembodied. So that doesn’t mean much, coming from you._

_You told me I looked like a tax accountant. That’s normal, isn’t it?_

_Sure, a tax accountant working for the IRS. Are you kidding me? That automatically makes you a weirdo._

_And what is so damning about the IRS?_

Dean pauses, mulling over the choices that spring to mind. _Come on, it’s the International Rollerderby Sect, what’s not wrong about that_ , he finally tells Castiel. _Really small religious faction, but any group’s gotta have someone to lord over the finances, you know._

Cas replies, _I see. Or so you claim._

Cas has gotten better at knowing when Dean’s pulling his nonexistent leg. Dean rolls his eyes, even if it is at empty air; it’s the meaning of the action that matters, he figures. If he tells that to himself enough times it doesn’t sting so much.

He picks the corner seat so his back’s to the wall. It’s as good a place as any to keep an eye over the place, over the sidewalk through the window, unless a hellhound’s about to tear through the café. And those dogs, he’d hear a mile off—would know the deep-throated, wailing cry singing down his bones like it was his own, those grotesque symphonies in Hell, scritch-scratch and knife slices and sputtered gasps. The music of the spheres, and for ten years it had been weirdly, horribly beautiful and he would sing along, off-key, _Hey Jude._

The black coffee snakes a burning trail down his throat. He sighs and sets down the cup, then shakes open the newspaper to skim the headlines. Nothing noteworthy, nothing that hints at a possible hunt that could make up for the fact he went off on the wrong route and ended up in Fort Collins when he could be farther south.

_Shit, I really wasted some gas_ , he grumbles. _Just kept right on 80 till it changed to 76, and didn’t even notice. Should’ve turned down sooner, for LA._

He’d gone back to the motel, thrown his stuff together, and checked out in the early hours of the morning, driving on the highway drunk with adrenaline and sheer willpower. Seven hours later, his eyes are probably bloodshot; he didn’t shower, so there’s still dirt rubbed into his skin here and there, and also the disinfected scrape at his chin, which stopped bleeding after the first hour. He doesn’t remember why he felt like he had to start for California, then and there. Kali breathed something into him, a raging fire blazing through his body, and now it’s finally died out into a pile of ashes.

Coffee’s tasteless in his mouth.

_It doesn’t matter_ , says Cas, sober and quiet. _It’s only a few hours lost, and the destination will still be there in the end. Thank you._

_Kali’s the one who tipped us off_. And holy fuck, he’ll be glad if he never sees her again. _You think I want you to be stuck with me as long as I’m around?_

_It’s true that I wish I could move of my own volition_ , Cas says. _But your company isn’t so cursed as you think it is._

Dean turns the newspaper page. Family of four saved from fire. A firefighter’s quoted as saying, This is my job, but I don’t do it just because it’s something I know how to do. I do it because I want to help people. _‘Course not. I’m awesome company._

_Dean. Do not lie._

_Dude_. Dean downs another gulp of black coffee. _Stop digging around my mind and trying to psychoanalyze me. Freud was full of himself, just saying._

_You know I’m not able to intrude with you in that fashion—I can only hear what you tell me. And Freud had a very uncomfortable couch, which was not helpful._

_Uhuh_. He’s fairly sure that most of the time Cas makes up meetings with past figures just for kicks. One day Cas will say he ran into Marilyn Monroe, or the crazy Byron who slept around like there was no tomorrow, and wouldn’t that be a grand shitshow?

Dean glances over the top of the paper. Maybe the barista was just surprised, and not repulsed, because she keeps shooting him lingering, inquisitive stares every other minute and doesn’t even bother to hide her interest. He can’t imagine she’s not familiar with flirting; she’s cute and has a nice smile, all slow and impish, and something in her face niggles at his mind but he can’t put his finger on it. He doesn’t rise to go back to the counter, though; a possible conversation with her is an idea he finds exhausting—would rather sit here, paper in hand, a travesty to coffee for a drink, and talk to Cas, who sometimes snaps in irritation and sometimes sees too deeply, and sometimes—

He had been a strange ally, to be sure. Stranger still that Cas would be his friend, someone who pulled him out of Hell and threatened to put him back—strung him along, asked him to torture, turned to help him, beat him up—but no matter what, in the end Castiel was still here.

_Whatever_ , he says. _Going there—it’s something to do. I can’t—I don’t know what else to do_. He props his elbows on the table and rubs his face. _I was a fucking idiot_ , he says, _I believed and I thought I could do it, but Sam’s still in there, he’s stuck and they gotta get out, and I don’t know, Cas, I don’t know._

He adds, _I wish I could talk to you proper._

_I didn’t wish to die_ , Cas says. _I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way._

Angels aren’t the best at apologies, but Cas does try. _We never do_ , Dean replies. He kneads his temples and stares at his coffee, just the bitter gritty dregs left now, but the frappuccino sits next to the empty cup, untouched. The whipped cream’s beginning to deflate.

_Yes_ , Cas says. _I know. But I regret_ —

_Look_ , Dean interrupts. _I sort of suck, okay? And I was gonna say yes, and you stopped me from doing that_ —

_I was angry_. Cas’s voice is flat, blank, and Dean feels a flush sliding down his neck, the shame of it all. _I regret it._

_Hey, it’s not like I’m perfect. Don’t sweat it._

_I believed that I thought you weren’t_ , says Cas, almost dreamily, _but once I knew myself as an angel of the Lord and I knew you body and soul, and then I could not and so I was wrong. I’m not so proficient at understanding, now._

_We’re all only human_ , says Dean, and the laugh bubbling up in his throat cringes sharply, dying a mirthless death. Body and soul, what a privilege to see him at his worst times. _Sorry. That’s a terrible joke._

_No_. Cas actually sounds amused. Bitter, but amused. _It’s not really a joke._

_Yeah._ Dean suppresses the urge to squirm. He angles his body sideways and stares out the window. The sky’s like any other day, slightly cloudy but mostly sunny, and people move alongside each other, against each other, and somehow coordinate their movements so it works, and occasionally he sees an arm jogged, an awkward left-right avoidance, but then it passes and they go on. They live their lives and go on.

Nothing else has ever seemed harder to Dean.

Instinct is still hardwired into his brain, though, so he snaps his head around when he hears footsteps, locking onto the barista. She stops dead in her tracks like a deer in headlights, a brief hiccup in her stride, but then she draws her shoulders back and comes up to the table.

She says, “I just got off my shift,” and he expects her to add, And I thought I’d just say hi, or possibly, Can I join you, or outrageously, I think you’re really hot and do you want to hang out—outrageous, because he feels like shit and looks it too—but instead what she says is, “And I’m sorry, you must think I’m a total, _complete_ creeper, but you sorta look familiar.”

He blinks and tenses, but he grins through his apprehension. “Really? Never knew there was anyone running around looking like me, I thought I was the one and only.” Fucking shapeshifters. Or the worst luck, she actually remembers his face from the FBI’s Most Wanted, even if he is legally dead and there are no more Winchesters as Henriksen would’ve declared, before Lilith came for them and blew the station sky-high to spare him the trouble.

She still looks embarrassed. “Just—like—I don’t know.” She shrugs. “A guy I met before.”

“Must have been an unusual experience,” he cracks.

Her eyes blank out briefly, and she shivers. “Could say that,” she replies. “It’s just—I heard the news that he died a while back.” Her voice is very small, and she’s wringing her hands. “So I wanted to apologize, you know, for staring, because I know you saw me doing that and must be so weirded out—“

“Nah.” He laces his fingers behind his neck and slouches back. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he says. Death’s ring rests under his shirt, against his skin, a perfect cool circle, and he thinks, I’m sorry he went. I hope he at least met a cool reaper. I hope he’s not a spirit I’m gonna have to put down. “It’s okay, I’m not spooked easily. Worse things to deal with than a pretty girl looking at you.”

“Not really a friend, but—he helped me once, and I never had the chance to repay the favor. I guess I should say thank you for the compliment,” she says, and there’s delight in her smile, sure, but it’s tempered with something almost like sorrow, and inexpressible gratitude. “Anyway, my name’s Haley. If you’re a new student, you should stop by more often.”

He keeps himself from making a face. God, Starbucks. And a student? Bad coffee versus a nice barista, though. “And get to see you?”

She colors, but straightens and says very steadily, “Starbucks always loves to have new customers,” and bobs her head and quickly doubles back before he can say anything else, to the counter where her replacement instantly pounces on her, presumably demanding details.

_She wasn’t giving you the evil eye after all_ , Cas says.

_Yeah, she had nice eyes_ , Dean replies. _Curly hair_. He frowns.

He picks up the frappuccino and takes one sip, and then sets it down. _All right_ , he says, _let’s head out_. Because as much as he said it didn’t bother him, it sort of does. The last thing he needs is attention drawn to him, and he’s certainly not the man the girl remembers, is only himself and no one else. Cas says, _Yes, let’s_ , and so Dean stands and throws away his empty cup and the frappuccino which would’ve been Sam’s and nods to the barista as he hurries on his way out, and she smiles back and ignores her friend’s hushed ribbing but her face is subdued and distant, as if she’s seeing something else behind her eyes.

-

He pulls the Impala onto the road and follows 70 and drives from Colorado straight on into Utah. Cas tells him, _There were forests greater than these when I last visited Arcadia and Latium_ ; and, _Coyote is the kind who finds these to his liking, this dust and rock and enough room to run free_ ; and, _I would like to try champagne, one day_ , when the Impala scoots past a billboard for a brewery, high and dry in the arid heat with the sign peeling at the corners.

“Sure,” Dean replies. So long as you don’t become a goddamn alcoholic in the future. “So long as I get all the beer.”

He calls Lisa. “Even farther?” she exclaims. “Why LA?”

“Just felt like it,” he says.

“Really.” Lisa sounds anxious. “I don’t want to get a phone call from some hospital saying Dean Campbell’s on life support, from a hunting accident or—“ She cuts herself off.

Dean isn’t dumb. Lisa had kept a carefully close eye on him the first few days, when he’d done very little more than stay in bed, and eat, and breathe; had tracked his usage of sleeping pills with razor-sharp precision. He isn’t dumb, and he’s thankful.

“I’ll be all right,” he says. “Tell Ben I’ll bring him a souvenir when I get back.”

He stops for half an hour on the side of the road, vehicles whizzing past like flies. The heat sits heavy on his chest and stagnates and smells of sweat, two days’ worth; he falls asleep listening to Cas reciting something incomprehensible, the hard c and v sounds of Enochian, _power glory and him that liveth forever_ , the quiet desperation to hold onto knowledge dying out of reach, like grass bent and shriveled with frost.

He checks in, ten at night. The motel has cactus-patterned wallpaper, the prickly bastards.

_I can’t remember_ , Cas says. He is resigned; since he was freed more than a week ago, he has spent ages sunk deep into himself, trying to ferret out memories, words, what makes up Cas and nothing else. _I’m sure I know of Papa but I can’t remember. I can’t._

_Just give it time_ , Dean says, and doesn’t say that maybe he’s forgetting because he’s not all angel, that God isn’t going to prop him up, that there’s no family left for either of them, but he thinks that Cas must know it anyway, the thought festering in a wound deep down.

Cas goes silent after that, voice snapped off sharp and weary.

Dean peels off his clothing, grimacing. Jacket and shirt and pants and all, and he lifts the necklace he wears over his head and sets it down on the bathroom counter, and counts to be sure: one two three four. His joints are stiff, corpse-like, dirt baked hard into skin, and he cracks his neck before stepping into the shower and turning the water all the way up.

Under the rising steam he stands and looks down, water spray beating against the top of his head before angling down his neck. Temperature’s pushed high, almost scalding skin, and he remembers this, he does, and wonders if Sam will remember this too.

Lucifer and Michael in the cage, together. Fuck, what a death match.

Maybe Death could come and take both of them out, he wonders; maybe he could track down Death—he had to return the rings in the end, or destroy them, so might as well ask. After they finished with this Papa in California, though the father of what he doesn’t know—creation and separation, Kali had said. _And separation._

Maybe he’ll leave after, he thinks. He’s suffered enough. He’s had enough of me, and enough of earth, and—

He can’t imagine. Thinks of Cas leaving, back to Heaven which stretches across planes and pokes its fingers into everything, deliberate and disregarding, and though he never saw Sam leaving till he did for college either way they both left or would leave, and somehow the first time he had managed and gone on hunting but the next time, the next time—

He presses his forehead against the shower walls and stares down at his feet. Skin’s turning faint pink from the heat, like half-cooked salmon. Sam had tried it first at Stanford, so he’d said, and had added, _It tastes good with lemon_ , sourness upon the tongue. He’d learned so much of the new and the ordinary and taken it in like a drowned man revived, but then Jess had gone up in flames, and so they always returned to hunting and to each other…

That’s who she was, he realizes. The first case after. Curly hair and the peanut M&M’s. Strung up like a sack of meat, him and her brother. And the brothers Winchester together, now legally dead.

He wonders how her brothers are doing. He can bet they’re not in Hell. But he can guess they’re alive, so there’s that much.

He’s really not the man she remembers. Forty years.

He can’t summon up the energy to care.

Dean turns his face into his hands and lets the water trickle between, slick skin pressed up against the water and steam till he thinks he could open up, unpeel himself like an onion. Here’s the rub, that he should recall almost all things about Hell except the ascent, Castiel burning firefly-bright in the vast dark pit, faint pinpricks reflected in his soul. He thinks, Or maybe third time’s the charm. Just one more chance.

He rakes his nails along his arms till the dirt brown shade is scrubbed out. There used to be a scar that lay diagonal across the crook of his left arm, either from the ghost in Santa Fe or from the bullet in Texarkana, and he can’t even remember what it looks like. Twelve-year-old Sam’s messy stitching no longer straggles along an absent cut in his right calf; and the ache in his pinky from the break while scuffling with a black dog—that’s gone too.

He rubs his hips, the slope of his stomach, the front of his thighs, takes himself in hand. Touches his shoulder. There, where the dimensions of the soul bled into the body and raised the mark as he had himself been raised. A press of fingers to the forehead, voice whisper-quiet, the skin at the nape of his neck prickling under Cas’s stare, a fist smashing across his cheek. Wide-eyed and relentless, letting Dean slump to the floor, _and you will not say yes._

Under the sparks of exploding lights, the cold, knowing gaze, Castiel murmurs, _You don’t think you deserve to be saved._

His breath hitches.

_Dean_ , Cas suddenly breaks in—

Dark spots thread through his sight like tendrils of thick smoke. He braces his heels at the juncture of shower wall and floor, the knobs of his spine rolling in-out against slippery tiling, and shudders, and then again.

_—are you listening?_ Castiel’s voice rumbles on, _I know now, I know_.

He bows in upon himself and looks at the shower curtain. Hot water sluices down his body and gathers under his feet, the knot of tension in his gut falling away and trembling in his legs. “Uh,” he says blankly. “What?” What was, he thinks. What. 

_Dean, are you all right?_ Cas asks. _You do not sound well._

“Yeah,” he says, isn’t quite sure what he’s saying yes to. “Just—just a moment.” He squeezes his eyes shut. The backs of his eyelids are blindingly bright.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ _Kalikamata_ , Castiel says. His voice is subdued. _Kalaratri. Hail, adi Mahavidya_. – translates to “black earth-mother,” “black night,” and “primordial/primary Mahavidya [a group of ten aspects of the female divine]” respectively. [source: David Kinsley's [Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas](http://books.google.com/books?id=gkCsrfghkZ4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=tantric+visions+of+the+divine+feminine&hl=en&ei=C9M5TZvoFcKAlAen-cXMBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false)]  
>  \+ _I don’t have the same faith in you that Sam does_. – from 5x18 (“Point of No Return”).  
>  \+ Colorado State University is located in Fort Collins, CO; Haley Collins is from 1x02 (“Wendigo”).  
> \+ and here’s the question, _who gripped you tight and raised you from_ — & … Cas murmurs, _You don’t think you deserve to be saved_. – from 4x01 (“Lazarus Rising”).


	3. Part 3

He was already four hours out of Cicero. Lisa had called him three times, and each time he’d let it go to voicemail and listened in silence.

Beep. “Hey, Dean, I was wondering if you could help pick up some groceries? I just remembered that we’re out of canola oil. Ask someone if you’re having trouble finding the right aisle.”

Beep. “Dean, Ben just called and said you weren’t at the house when he got home from his baseball game. Just get back to me when you can.”

Beep. “Dean Winchester, where in the world are you? You’re in absolutely no shape to just up and leave without a word, and spare me your crap about being okay—I’m not an idiot. _You’re_ an idiot.” Pause. “Oh for god’s sake, Dean.”

Lisa was too kind, worrying over someone who happened to be an old one-night-stand and helped get Ben out of trouble. He’d landed on their doorstep without any warning, and yet she’d given him a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place to dream. It was a cheap way of repayment, but the least he could do was avoid bringing his troubles onto their heads. Dean thought, It’s okay, it’ll all be okay, and parked the Impala at the next crossroads, deserted in the middle of nowhere.

He carried no box filled with the sad tangible things that were poor substitutes for memories and even poorer ones for people, no plastic toy soldier or wrinkled photos. He tugged the cord around his neck over his head and held it up and watched the rings gleam dully under the cloudy sky. Then he crouched down and dug with his bare hands and buried them deep in the earth, and waited for no one, no crossroads demon wearing a sly smile and gleaming ruby eyes but lay down upon the ground, curled up with his knees drawn against his chest, and fell asleep listening to the thumping in his ears, in truth that which was his own heartbeat but if he deluded himself enough he could imagine was the steady thrum of Sam’s heart, Sam alive, far down under and echoing through the earth and past the boundaries of Hell.

He turned his head and squinted up at the shadow that fell across him. Cas looked even paler, his trench coat thin and insubstantial, and so too was his body, his face skeleton-bare. The only blotches of color Dean could see clearly were Cas’s eyes, blazing feverishly blue.

“Cas!” Dean sat up sharply. “You made it.”

_No, Dean_ , he heard. He frowned and cocked his head, but kept his gaze on Cas, who reached over Dean’s hip and pressed his hand to the patch of ground boxed in by Dean’s body, over the Horsemen’s rings. Cas’s breathing grew sick and shallow, little huffs of air tickling the hem of Dean’s shirt; he said, “Yes, I did. I can find the start. But the rest of the journey I must give over to you.”

The pit of Dean’s stomach twisted ever slightly, from nerves and the quiet fear. “How long are you gonna be able to stay with me?” he asked.

Cas opened his mouth and Dean heard the echo, _I am here and where else would I go_ , except what his lips shaped were, “Only for a little while.” He gripped Dean by the arm and pulled him up, fingers digging in like pincers; turned and led Dean toward the mouth of a cave, which Dean had not noticed before and which possibly had not even existed then. Cas stopped and closed his eyes, as if to ground himself; he looked like a gust of wind would pulverize him to ashes. Or a snap of the fingers, so it went. “There’s a weakness here,” he said. “I can feel Lucifer’s grace.” He opened his eyes and gazed at Dean, deep grooves under his eyes.

Dean shook off Cas’s grip and stepped back. “All right,” he said, and tried not to stare at Castiel, at his face peeling and lined and falling apart. He wanted to ask, And you, are you all right, though he was not blind and the answer stared and mocked him in the face, but Cas said abruptly, loudly, “Go!” and he went. He glanced over his shoulder only once but Castiel was no longer there.

-

In the cave the shadows coalesced in thickened blotches like squid ink, and grazed his eyelashes, sank through to the backs of his sockets and lazed into puddles and solidified to the consistency of burnt fat, but it was a familiar sensation and he stared into the void and thought, Sam will be there, and walked right in. He would have thought it a breeding place for demons, the way his ears muffled themselves and his eyes stung and his mouth dried out, but he knew better now and had learned that the only places most demons grew were within the hearts of the humanly damned.

He couldn’t sense Cas at all. Any sign of the angel was buried, unperceivable. Dean thought, We’ve come this far, you’re with me, right—right, you are—and forged onward. The numbness seeped into him steadily.

He didn’t know how much time had passed, and didn’t try to keep track. At one point he had to slow to a stop. My hands, he thought, where are my fucking hands? It was easy to fall into his old habits, how simple it was to settle his mind and concentrate—here is my left elbow, here is my kneecap, my jawbone, my right hand. Here are the veins which flow from the heart. Only by keeping himself in mind had he been able to gather up pieces torn apart after each session, painstakingly matching them up again till the next time and the next. Every time he had pulled himself together to become whole again, hooked into the rack, until the very last. Yes, yes, yes. After that he had no need to remember—it was easier that way, to dig in from all angles and feast on the pain with a hunger that was never quite sated.

(When he dreamed he always saved his shoulder for last. It tasted sweet, spun out of air into wafers of clouds, fleeting on the tongue like a candied spider web. The roiling in his gut settled, quieting down.

That was where it always ended.)

He walked; he didn’t know the passage of time but that made no impression on him. The smoke began to dissipate, and now he looked down and saw that he was not stepping on the cave floor. Where the oblivion of darkness met his feet, the grinding outlines of wheels emerged. The spokes were crackling white with lightning, the rims patterned like almond-shaped holes. The spokes flickered once, twice—in the holes he saw the pinpoints of pupils staring up mindlessly—then the lightning died again, and the eyes went out.

He stood stock still. All those eyes.

He dropped down, staring at the ground through which the wheels creaked like gears, a clockwork mechanism that ran effortlessly onward, no oversight necessary over this cage tucked away into some dimension of Hell. “Sam,” he said hoarsely, the words rough and raw. “Sammy! Sam.” So close, so easy.

The wheels rattled _Sam Sammy Sam_ back at him. _Dean, no_ , and there was the faint moan, not Sam’s voice, but he thought, Yes. Fuck, yes.

He felt the jolt flash through him with the next flare, but shook the black spots out of his vision. _Do not_ , Cas snapped, _you will not._

He was about to start, Cas, what the fuck, you told me about this, you did and it worked, it’s _working_ —but didn’t say anything, and looked, and looked. Sam stared up at him, a sliver of hazel through the rim of the wheel. There was something terribly awful about looking at Sam in Hell—dazed, like he did not recognize his brother.

“It’s me,” he managed, almost laughed. “Sam, it’s me.”

Sam blinked. All along the wheels each pupil blinked. Sam with a thousand eyes, watching him. Waiting.

He heard it, though barely a whisper. “Out,” Sam said. He sounded half-conscious, numb and barely responsive. “I want out.”

He said, “Please.”

“I’ll get you out. Fuck, Sam, I’m getting you outta here.” He didn’t move, and kept right on looking. I know I’m asleep, he thought. I’m dreaming. I’m really dreaming.

The interlocked wheels lit up again, stabbing sharp and furious. Dean said, “Cas?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He breathed in deeply and let himself scatter, let go the skin and bone and muscle. How laughably easy, miraculous this was, the power of imagination. In Hell he could do anything he set his mind to, don’t fight it, so said Alastair. He forgot himself wholly and slipped into the cracks, even though it was cold and quite bare and he could go no further, wriggling up against the barrier, smoke to smoke. The warmth burned inside him, finger-light smudges all across, and the one place where Castiel had held on tight.

His hunger twisted, queasy, like something had gone down wrong. Hot dog for lunch today. Yeah, he thought, I want them out of the cage. _Sammy_ , he said.

“I can hear you. I can’t see you.”

_Where’s Lucifer and Michael? No fucking way I’m having them around._

“There’s always lightning. They’re always fighting.” Sam added, nonsensically, “I have headaches.” His voice dulled in blank bewilderment, as though he knew only the statement and not the emotion.

_What, they just shucked you and Adam off and started going at it?_ And what’ve they done, Dean thought. What’ve they done to you? _Where’s Adam?_

“We’re just—collateral, so,” Sam said. “I can’t stay, Dean—“

_Dean. Dean—_

_—o_ , he heard.

He shivered, though there was no chill to be felt. In Hell there were no cold spells except for the ones that grew within themselves and exploded outward, rings of fear. He said, _Sam, how long?_

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “Too long. I can’t keep track.” Every word drawn from him seemed to exhaust his scant reservoir of strength. “I’m tired.”

He flinched back, remembering Cas’s words: _Time is not the same, and Lucifer’s cage is like none other._

He said, _Least you kept your head. You remember what you look like, right? You can’t, I’ll remember for you._

“I.” Open, close. Sam stared up past him like he wasn’t even there, probably expecting him in his body proper, not like this, but he could hear Sam so close by, he could hear the heartbeat. Right there. “I don’t know. Where are you?”

_I’m here, bitch._

He waited, humming. Sam said, “I missed you, Dean.”

His reply faltered, a beat missed, and the chill crept into him slow and cruel, icicles to the heart of it. A thousand little things which had been adding up one by one blipped to their final summation; he thought, You motherfucker, you bastard, you. Couldn’t think for a moment.

And he said, simply, deliberately, _Couldn’t let my brother stay down here, huh?_ He slid around the grooves of the wheels, sharp ends gaping wide and piranha-teeth-sharp, and said, _Don’t go anywhere. There’s a lot to tell you._ (So here’s one. He’s sitting on the porch with a beer in hand, and Lisa comes out and says, That’s the third and last one, yeah? ‘Course, he says, sorry, Lisa. You know one of my friends emptied a liquor store and only got tipsy? Now that was goddamn inhuman. She says, And what, his liver failed him? Lots of things failed him, he tells her. God failed him. He failed a lotta things too, like me.) _So here’s one. I had to bury Bobby, you know, and then I went to Lisa’s and she let me stay. And all the stuff I had to deal with—I couldn’t even tell her you were dead, I just said you were gone. I tried, believe me, I tried, but—sorry man, I came for you. Cas told me how._

“Cas?” Slow befuddlement in Sam’s voice. “How did he know?”

_I could ask you the same_ , he snarled. _You lying sonuvabitch._

There was no more lightning. Sam’s eyes blinked, very slowly, the endless rows of dreary half-open ellipses peering at him, and when they opened the Devil said with dignified reproach, “Dean, you shouldn’t say that about Mom.”

_What did you do?_ he said, boiling out of smoke with hands clenched tight. “Where’s Sam and Cas?” And: “If I could I’d rip your tongue out.” He could strangle, too, and cut and carve and dig into the very heart of the body, he could but he couldn’t, because it was Sam.

“Oh, Dean.” Cas’s voice was mild and soothing, and not at all like Cas. “I tried, I really did. You wanted your brother, I showed you how to get him back. You wanted the angel here, and so I did it again. You were so blind, and I thought you’d be pleased.”

He snapped his head to the side so quickly. “Cas?” he said disbelievingly. Cas, who stood with hands shoved in pockets and tilting his head and—smiling, fuck, he was smiling and for a moment he couldn’t bear the sight, it was the vacant smile on Cas drugged up all over again, Zachariah’s gift. “That’s not him,” he said.

“Of course not,” Lucifer said. He wore the dream image of Jimmy Novak as casually as Castiel did not, and carefully adjusted the tie, patting down the trench coat. His nose wrinkled. “What tipped you off?”

“I’m the biggest fucking jerk you’ll ever meet,” Dean said. “And Sam knows that better’n you. You’re a brother, but you’re not mine.”

“You would have been so happy,” Lucifer murmured. “You didn’t think any worse of Castiel, did you? He told you what you wanted to hear. He had faith in you. He was helping you save Sam. You believed it all. I saw your suffering when you were awake, even if I only spoke to you in dreams. You felt how it is to lose your brother—with that kind of loss, why couldn’t I help you have him back?”

He gritted his teeth. Sam jumped in, he thought, he jumped and took the devil with him, this is not the devil—but. He looked at Lucifer who was Castiel who was Jimmy Novak, the warped figure like negatives of a photograph ruined. He stood too straight and kept his arms crossed too neatly; his hair was flawlessly even—as though after all the slow deterioration in Dean’s dreams, he’d snapped like a rubber band from one end to another, from entropy to the cleanest, most orderly appearance possible.

“I didn’t believe enough,” Dean said. “You made it too easy. I couldn’t—it was never about Sam, it was about you, wasn’t it? You wanting out? Where’s Sam? Where the _fuck_ is Cas?”

“It’s really as easy as it is.” Lucifer tilted his head to the side, frightening in its pitch-perfect echo of Cas’s habit with wide blue eyes and perplexed face. “Your brother is with me. What a perfect specimen,” he said, almost like he was singing, “so much rage and love in him.” Then he suddenly gave Dean a knowing smile and the straight line of his teeth flashed in the darkness. “And would you believe me if I said my brother is dead?”

For a second Dean felt nothing but terror, but he hissed, “Why the hell would I trust you?” Besides, he thought desperately, Castiel always comes back.

Under his feet the eyes had closed and gone blank. They stood in the darkness, which pressed down on Dean like heavy blankets, thick and smelling cloyingly sweet like chloroform.

“No, you wouldn’t,” Lucifer murmured. “You wouldn’t accept it even when your brother was dead. Castiel is in here somewhere, but I kept him quiet. I didn’t lie, you know. He left a bit of his grace with you, so when I took care of his vessel he made a beeline for you. Would’ve made it too, but I sent an imprint after him and rode him, took his dream body instead. Or perhaps I should say I was created by Lucifer? Simply the virtue of knowing many places at once. He’s been fighting for a long while now. I’m surprised you didn’t notice.”

“And I guess Cas is winning,” Dean spat, ignoring Lucifer’s jab. “You sorta looked like a corpse last time I saw you.” He thought of the words thrown at him and striking without impact, _don’t listen don’t listen._ He’d noticed, but—hadn’t dared to suspect. “You weren’t even strong enough to pull off your own break-out? Had to go through me?”

“I didn’t lie to you when I said it’s practical to have a failsafe. The crossroads are close to this plane, and even if you didn’t intend to let me out, the presence of the Horsemen’s rings you brought here in your dream so close to my cage would weaken it as time passes. It’s true your precious Castiel wasn’t giving up, but in such close proximity to my original self—“ Lucifer took a step forward—covered the distance between them, abruptly there where he was not before, cheek to cheek. He said, expelling warmth onto Dean’s neck, “It’s—so—much— _easier_ to wrestle him down again. So I have you to thank for that, Dean Winchester.”

Dean slid his gaze sideways, looking at the familiar face. Steady blue eyes, the barest hint of stubble on the chin, the tendon standing out in the neck. One of the buttons on the trench coat hung carelessly from a loose thread.

He drew his hand back and threw a jab at the stomach, knuckles smashing against the coat buttons. Lucifer stumbled, doubling up, and straightened again—he dodged Dean’s next swing, dancing back in a quick hop-skip. “Resorting to physical violence,” he commented. “What a classic. Shall we tango?”

“You’re gonna let him go,” Dean snarled. “Why shouldn’t I beat you up, you fucker—“

“If you’re willing to sacrifice Castiel—he can’t take on this body anywhere anymore, you know,” Lucifer said conversationally. “Where will he go?”

“I’ll take care of him.” Dean bared his teeth and felt his simmering anger flare up now, a ring of fire from his head to his gut driving him forward. “You can’t hurt me, can you? This is still my dream.”

Lucifer looked pitying. “You really are _such_ a human,” he sighed. “The world’s not your oyster, but you’ve all taken over and will end up destroying it. A beautiful creation you’re leading to ruin. Perhaps you started the dream,” he corrected, “but why do you think you retain all control over it?”

“It’s my goddamn mind!”

Lucifer laughed full-out, and Dean flinched back as though struck. If the Castiel of the future had not been drugged and dissolute, he might have sounded like this, a careful, cultured laugh touched with insincere amusement, void of true emotion. “We’re above you, Dean,” he said, almost kindly. “We’re not bound by human limitations. Castiel came into your dreams without your permission. Zachariah undoubtedly played some tricks on you, and he would have been truly great if only he were not so blindly loyal to our Father. Why wouldn’t I be able to do anything myself? I’ll keep you here and you won’t be able to escape and your dream will never end. Don’t be upset. When the cage weakens enough and I’m free again, I’ll bring your Sam out with me. You’ll have him back, happy? That’s all you ever wanted.”

“Then what the fuck was the point of this in the first place?” Dean gritted out lowly, his stomach churning like curdled milk. “All that time having to play buddy-buddy with you for nothing? What the fuck did my brother jump in for? To let the world go to hell? I want Sammy out, but him and Adam only. You and Michael, you sick fuckers, you can stay here and rot.”

“I’ve already been here for so long,” Lucifer said. The face Dean knew best as Castiel looked strangely mournful, the corners of his eyes drawing down. “My Father has been the cruel one.”

“And you’ve learned nothing good from it,” Dean growled, falling back. He wondered if Lucifer was that dumb—just like a demon, like a human, taking the pain and unleashing it on others, and not even realizing. It was pretty pathetic, actually, knowing others better than he knew himself.

You can’t keep me here, he thought savagely, and his lips lifted into a humorless smile. I know how, and you’re not gonna think of it because you’d never do it, you think you’re too good for that. But me—I already did it and I’d do it again.

First though: Sam was still in the cage with Lucifer, and Castiel with this shoddy echo of the Morning Star. One by one, he thought—fuck you, Alastair, but I guess I learned some useful stuff after all, Dean decided coldly, and let himself go; threw away his body and stripped down, remembering forty years in Hell, ten years the torturer. He had not forgotten the hunger.

He swarmed forward at Lucifer, a hissing mass of smoke—crammed himself straight down the throat, viciously gnawing and tunneling down into the gut, the most painful way, the best kind of screams. _Cas!_ he shouted. _Castiel!_

“You—“ Lucifer said, his voice strained.

_Yeah, me. I got a few tricks up my sleeve too_ , Dean slurred. He lashed out mindlessly, felt the body fracture and buckle like sheeted metal. This is what it’s like to possess, he thought. The warmth inside him suddenly expanded till it seemed that fire burned in his very touch, charring the innards of the body—the solidity slipped away under his wrath, but he held on and raged through the coldness around him and there, warmer and warmer—

_Dean._

There. He came to the boundary that shifted from the alien to the familiar and tore at it. Remembered the hellhounds, the finesse with which they’d carved him out on the rack, and mimicked the angle, slicing deeper. _Go_ , he snapped, _if you’re there, Cas, go and get the fuck out!_

_Dean—_

The voice blinked out, weak and exhausted. But Dean still carried the heat with him, a soul torch blazing—and that had to’ve been Cas, he decided, had to be, ignored the niggling whisper, or maybe that was Lucifer all over again—and let the wildfire run.

Just an imprint whatever, he thought, and said, _I’ll burn your heart out, you bastard—watch and see, I’ll burn this fucking dream from the inside out._

_Doesn’t matter, you’ll still be stuck here—and the rings as well_ —Lucifer’s words filtered through the inferno like falling droplets, hissing into air upon impact.

_Watch and see_ , Dean said.

He turned in upon himself, fire against fire, and found the core, a jagged shard flashing deadly like black obsidian out of volcanic fury, wrapped himself around it, Castiel’s little bit of grace, and sank down. Carried the old memory with him like lead weight—an ordinary life, Mom and Dad alive, Sam and Jess getting married, him being loved, and the false dream asking him, _Why’d you have to keep digging? Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?_

At least Lisa won’t be mad if I’m only committing suicide in a dream, he thought inanely. Then: Sammy, just hold on—I’ll be back, I’ll be back for you.

In his mind’s eye he saw his hands holding the knife, bringing it down on himself. Lucifer would never do it. Dean had, and did.

Castiel’s grace shone bright, and cut as sharp as a battlesword.

-

_Wake up. You can’t die like this, Dean_ , Castiel rasped out. _God? Please._

His eyelids fluttered against the dirt. He lay facedown on the ground, drenched in sweat that soaked his T-shirt and jacket all the way through, even as the night breeze flowed over him steadily and dried him off. He turned over and looked up. Above him the night sky was blank and fathomless and though he was far away from the lights of any town or city he saw no sign of stars.

Crickets were chirping, far off in the forest.

_Get up!_

“I’m,” he moaned, coughed into the ground. “I’m not deaf, got it?” Not dead, either.

The silence was exhausted, heavy with inexpressible relief.

“Cas?”

_Yes._

“It’s really you?”

_Yes._

He closed his eyes, lips against the dirt. Castiel. “I can’t see you,” he said.

_No. No one can._

“Shit,” Dean said; muttered to the open air, “What the fuck’re we gonna do?” He hauled himself up, felt his phone weighing heavily in his pocket, and checked. Two new voicemails from Lisa blinked at him.

He thought, Should call and say I’m not dead after all.

_Dean_ , said Castiel, as if he couldn’t say the name enough times, testing his voice, his freedom and existence. The beauty of speech. _Dean._

“I’m here,” Dean said dully. Sam and Lucifer were not. He twisted to the side, and threw up.

*

_She’s known as Papa of the earth, in the south Pacific_ , Cas had said. _She from whom lands are born._

“She calls herself _Papa_?” Dean mumbles.

_No. She is called Papa. And not everyone speaks your kind of English, Dean._

Haloa is, according to Cas, another name for the taro plant— _like potatoes_ , Cas explains—so Dean can’t imagine why there’s a café named after a plant, not even a flashy cool one but just starchy tubers, a little café which doubles as a deity’s occasional hangout, tucked away into the basement floor of an old building on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and says as much.

_I won’t start with the use of taro as a staple food across continents then, since it’s so boring to you_ , Cas replies. _I suppose you would find more interesting the fact that it’s sometimes called elephant ears for household decoration?_

“Cas, don’t tell me you were reading house magazines in your free time. Could do a lot better than learn about furniture polish.”

_No_ , Cas says, then admits, _I skimmed a lot of travel brochures. And the old prophets’ tales._

“They always get drunk like Chuck?” Dean asks, and downs the rest of his drink, fizzing in his mouth. He still can’t believe he’s drinking Coke in a café. Still, better than being drunk when trying to find a deity to talk to.

_Sometimes. Worse._

Haloa’s bathed in dim light, a soft mixture of muted blue and yellow on earth-brown walls, with scattered tables here and there, brightly painted stools at the counter. He sits at the very end, his back curved over his drink as if to hide its non-alcoholic appearance. It also helps to hide the fact that he’s talking out loud to no one there.

He isn’t sure what he’s looking for. Cas says he was never assigned to the Pacific region, so he’s not all that familiar with her either. _I could have learned the necessary information before_ , he says, _over—angel radio, as you say—but now_ … If Cas had a body he’d be lowering his gaze right now at this, the way he would with an issue he doesn’t want to address.

_It’s fine_ , Dean tells him, though nothing’s really fine, and signals the bartender over. “Another Coke, thanks,” he says.

The bartender looks him up and down coolly. “Sure you don’t want a proper drink?” he asks. He’s got a stocky build, dark hair cropped close to his scalp, and his eyes assess every person who comes into the bar like he’s running them through an X-ray machine. Friendly much, Dean thinks, and suppresses the urge to roll his eyes. “Looks like you need one.”

“Nah, I’m good,” Dean says. “Have some business later to take care of. Just killing time while I can.”

The man shrugs. “As you like, man,” he says, and wanders off to greet a new customer, a slight, coltish girl in a flowery dress who definitely doesn’t look over twenty-one. He clearly recognizes her though, and waves her toward a room in the back. Looks like family to the management.

Dean sits and nurses his Coke. God, he feels like a teenager. Fucking Coke. Then again, all the other alcoholic drinks have fancy umbrellas in them. He would’ve bought them for Sam.

Doesn’t think about the motel in Utah. That wasn’t what it was, he tells himself. It’s just. Been a while since I’ve done that.

_There’s something strange about this place_ , Cas says, the cadence of his words vibrating through Dean’s body.

_You think?_ Dean shivers, looking up at the flower garlands which stretch across the ceiling, fresh and vibrant. You’d think they would die in the dark like this, he thinks, and wonders.

And there’s not even a pool table.

(Looks like hustling’s on tonight, he says. He winks. I get to play winner.

What, so you can buy drinks for all the girls?

Sammy, he replies, you’ve got terrible, terrible priorities. First thing I’m gettin’ is food.)

A wave of vertigo suddenly swims across his eyes, the ceiling seesawing with the ground, and he grips the counter tightly. _Cas_ , he says tightly, _if you could stop._

Castiel is utterly wrapped up in his analysis. _It feels like it’s breathing_ , he replies, _and—_

“You there.” The bartender’s back, wiping his hands on a muddy rag and yet keeping them clean. He tosses the cloth onto the counter, where it leaves a perfect brown skid. “Who you doing business with?”

Dean shrugs. “None of _your_ business,” he says. “Just waiting for someone.”

Cas sighs. _You_ could _try not to be so mouthy._

“Wait for your friend somewhere else,” the man says. “We’re closing down.”

Dean stares at him. “It’s only eight o’clock, and you’re closing? Who the hell closes this early?” What the fuck, he’ll take the plunge. “Whatever. You know someone named Papa coming in, let me know.” He gets off the stool, swipes his half-finished Coke off the counter—no sense in wasting the drink—and tugs on his jacket with one hand.

Okay, so he didn’t expect to be choked in the next second.

The bartender says in a conversational tone, “How you know about her? She doesn’t go ‘round advertising herself.” He’s smiling now, but his eyes are flinty pieces of rock. The muscles in his arm stand out like thick cords.

Dean splutters and jabs at his neck, before the tight grip suddenly disappears and he slumps to the floor, gasping. _All right, Cas_ , he says, _maybe you had a point._ “Someone I know.” He rubs his throat—damn, only a few seconds or so but he swears he can feel the places where fingernails dug into skin, thin curves of red like little arches. “Kali said I should swing by and say hi.”

“Kali, huh?” The man says, and grins, showing all his teeth. The about-face is as abrupt as his strangling fingers were. “She’s not one to send mortals off alive. A-plus for you.” He nods. “Hallway, second door on the right. Guess you’ll be entertaining.”

“Excuse me?” Dean narrows his eyes.

“You’ll be entertaining,” the bartender repeats. “Hop to it, snail boy. Like I said. I’m closing down.”

_Snail boy? What the hell_ , Dean snaps as he marches off. _Bastard._

_I can testify you don’t have a shell_ , Cas offers.

_Fuck you too._

He doesn’t knock at the door, just opens it and strolls right in. “The bartender told me I could find Papa,” he says, then blinks. “Uh, sorry. You mind telling me where she is?”

The girl who Dean had tagged as a relative to management looks up. She’s curled up in a green-vine-patterned dish chair, flipping through a book, and when she sets it down on the floor Dean sees the pages are filled with photographs of volcanoes.

She slides out of the chair, flowing like water, but doesn’t look at them. Instead, she starts cleaning off the round table in the middle of the room. “Whatcha want from her?” she says briskly, bent over the magazines she tosses onto the dish chair.

“Kali sent me,” Dean says, because he might as well get down to business, and judging from past experiences the gods of the world don’t have too much patience. “There’s a disembodied angel who’s been stuck with me and she said Papa could do a few pointers, do a better job of getting this fixed.”

“Isn’t that a miracle,” the girl says, and turns. “Kali’s actually giving me some credit for once.” She gives Dean a look-over, her gaze lingering on his chest as if she could see the Enochian on his ribs, Castiel’s writing emblazoned in protection over his heart. “Good mood, too, if you’re here and breathing in the first place. A pair of miracles.”

Cas says, _So. This is Papa_. There’s faint bewilderment and curiosity in his words, and Dean doesn’t blame him. When he looks closer he realizes that it wasn’t so much that the girl was a girl as it is Papa’s a short thin woman—the bones of her face aren’t baby-like at all, sun-dark skin stretched taut over the skull and straight black hair twisted back into a messy braid. Her arms and legs are knobbly, slender, like a foal’s, and her fingers dance in a wild tap against her hip agile as spider legs.

But her eyes—he averts his gaze. Kali had been full of battle fervor and terrible light; Papa’s eyes are—

“You’re a daring one, seeking us out,” Papa says, curving her mouth whimsically. “How are you called?”

Dean clears his throat. That son of a bitch, it still hurts. “Dean Winchester,” he says. “Angel’s Castiel, and he’d say hi, but—“

“He can say hi,” Papa interrupts, and taps the side of her head. “I don’t bite. Skip the formalities, I hate those.”

_My greetings to you, Papa_ , Castiel says carefully, warily, and Dean would too, because the cheery playfulness Papa’s giving off is unnerving as hell. Even the pattern on her flower dress is made up of clumps of bright orange flowers, shaped like birds’ beaks, as if they’re about to chomp down on each other. Her voice is nectar-sweet, and Dean wonders how quickly it can spoil.

“Castiel, Dean, nice to meet you,” she trills. “Heard about you through the grapevine. The whole thing about the fallen one being awful irritating, not the whole stuck together thing. I’d ask your dad about how he made the cage, because the structure’s terribly fascinating, but he’s gone and hidden himself.” She sighs.

She doesn’t know anything about the cage either, Dean thinks, and tries to quell the disappointment rising in his chest. Fuck, was God that damn secretive about it all? On the other hand, maybe the other deities just didn’t care.

_Yes_ , Cas says. _It’s a common source of frustration._

“He just gets too worked up about his creations,” Papa says. “If I cared that much—well now.”

Dean steels himself and looks back into her face—sees Papa’s eyes rolling like black pitch, and within that the bleeding fire that splits the seams of the shadowed earth. The pupils gape open, two hollowed-out caverns.

He thinks, You do care. You just aren’t going to show it.

“So why did Kali send you to me anyway?” Papa asks, her face light and merry, and the color of her eyes goes blank slate gray.

“No blood,” Dean says. He shifts his weight from left to right foot, but Papa hasn’t offered him a seat. “At least for Castiel, and no body.”

“I see,” Papa replies. She crosses her arms over her chest. In her slip of a dress, she abruptly looks more like a pensive teenager than like a deity of earth. Then Papa nods and straightens. “A bit galling, I suppose,” she says. “Kali’s limited by blood here. The Kali of her homeland would be able to do this. But I know this kind of molding, and my people are closer to me even if we are fewer.” She hums and tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, and swings over to lean against the wall. “So, why should I bother?”

“Wait,” Dean says. “You can—“

“I can split you up,” she drawls, shrugging. “I can take you all apart, I can sift your molecules and shake you out like sand if I wished. And I can see how Castiel’s tethered to you, and I can give you two the means to make his own representation. But.” The skin at the corners of her eyes crinkle with amusement. “Why should I care?”

Dean scrutinizes the slopes of her cheeks, the narrow angles of her shoulders. No soul to trade this time, no offer of the body; he has already traveled to Hell and Heaven and suffered and exalted and yet all of it pales to the rocky, solid presence of earth, the Impala rumbling under his touch, a slice of pie disintegrating to crust and sticky fruit crumbs in his mouth.

_You don’t have to_ , says Castiel levelly. _No one requires you to care about the affairs of others, only your own. But consider this a favor for a future favor. I choose to bear the cost._

Dean tenses. _Wait a minute—_

“Unspecified?” Papa asks. She drags her knuckles hard across the wall, the friction ripping them open out to leave a sketched trail of blood behind.

_Done._

_Whoa, whoa, Cas_ , Dean snaps. Even if Papa can hear them, the instinct to refrain from speaking aloud kicks in. _You can’t just leap into something like that, you don’t know what she—_

_I choose this_ , Castiel breaks in. _I will not have you bound to any more obligations but the ones you make for yourself._

_No_ , Dean says, and, “No,” under his breath. _You’re not letting me have any say in this, are you? We’re in this together, we go down together._

_You’ve already given enough—_

_We both have_ , Dean snaps. _I’m not gonna compare straws with you, got it? We got goddamn crappy ones, who cares if mine’s shorter than yours or the other way ‘round?_

_Dean, I—_

“My,” Papa exclaims softly. Dean brings his head up to see her observing them—him—her face smooth and unsmiling and coldly serious. “You’ve been burned by many a deal, have you?” She turns her face into the wall and slowly sucks in her breath—a sound that should be quiet, natural, but echoes loud in Dean’s ears, like the very room’s breathing with her; and the floor trembles like it’s going to rise up and open into the bottomless maw of some primordial creature, huge and silent and starving. Castiel makes an incomprehensible sound, almost a moan, as if he could reach out for that terrible emptiness, the encompassing awareness across space and time and the unutterable sounds of the earth and sky.

Papa glances back.

Holy shit, Dean thinks, his hands reflexively tightening into fists. Even as he watches, the gaunt features of her face fill out, flesh rippling under her skin like waves straining to break free, constrained only by the sheer will and power of her body as she strides toward them. With each step she lengthens and widens, her arms taut with muscle and her face rounding out like a sun-baked coconut, darkening to the color of rich silt. The orange flowers spread even more brightly across her dress, over her shoulders, growing out from the cloth to twine around her neck and her hair in a garland, a victory crown, a mourning wreath.

When she comes to Dean she’s two heads higher than him, and it’s nothing like standing next to Sam. Fuck, if he were here—but Dean’s got nothing except himself and Cas. He doesn’t draw back but keeps his feet planted on the ground, cocking his head back to look at her straight on. Her eyes are still the same blank gray, the only thing about her that’s lifeless and still. The ground vibrates up through his feet, his legs, his heart—in and out, like it’s breathing in time with the rhythm of his lungs.

“I can see why Kali let you go,” Papa says. Her voice is throaty, rich and low. “You have real nerve, and she’ll always acknowledge another demon-slayer.”

Takes one to kill one, Dean thinks.

Papa places her hands on his shoulders, immovable as rock walls. “Perhaps I’ll call on you,” she says. “Perhaps not. But if you ever free your brother, Dean Winchester, I expect to learn about the cage and how, and count it signed and sealed.” She presses down on him, like he’s going to sink down and down and—

—and he fucking well is. _Dean, get out_ , Cas prods urgently, _I don’t know what she’s doing, but_ —“How the hell is getting buried alive a favor?” Dean shouts up, and pulls at Papa’s arms but it’s like shoving at mountains—

—thinks frantically, Getting stuck in the ghost’s grave, now this, fuck, Sam’s still there, was gonna get Ben a jersey, and Cas, you can’t do this to him, not Cas, not me.

“This is how it works,” Papa replies to Cas. “Think of your own image for once, angel. There are no vessels for you but your own make. Our business is finished.” Now she’s the one looking into Dean’s eyes, limpid silver-blue, a reflective pool like the lake in Montana where Sam divebombed Dean and they went cliff-jumping after school, except the wind’s whipping the water up now, cloudy dark and raging, and Papa bends down and presses her lips against Dean’s forehead, streaked with crumbly loam—

A whirling cold blasts through Dean like a hurricane. Castiel says, _Oh—_

The sudden silence lodges in his mind, the chill sluicing over his left shoulder insidiously quick till Dean thinks he might pass out from the maddening quiet and the icy fingers tightening around his heart, digging jagged nails into his ribs—he jerks his head upward, snarls, “Where the fuck’d you take him? We had a deal—”

“Shhh,” says Papa chidingly. She raises a hand to her mouth, the tip flaring in a bright pinprick before expanding to fill Dean’s vision, a brilliant star blazing hotly over his face—then her palm upon his mouth, his sight whiting out—

“See you on the other side,” Papa tells him.

And he thuds down, hard, mud in his mouth, Cas gasping loud and clear against his ear. “Dean,” he says, garbled words like cracked eggs, “I don’t remember—I can’t keep this”— _whole, I’ve forgotten Jimmy’s body—_

“Dude,” Dean tells him, and nearly gags, spits the mud out, but wherever he is, the sides close in on them gently, alien in its spongy feel. Thinks of Papa shoving him down into the ground, the earthen walls of Haloa, a womb in itself. “You fucking put me back together. Gotta count that.”

He can’t see a thing, even when he strains his eyes, but he can still hear Cas breathing fast, shell-shocked and bewildered, as if in the little time he’s gone without a body he’s already lost himself to the idea of a voice and only that, buried under Lucifer and tethered to Dean and nothing else.

“That was you—not me”— _I’m not taking you—_

“Fuck, c’mon!” He squeezes his eyes shut; remembers the light painted on the back of his eyelids, Cas clapping him on the shoulder, cocking his head, wrinkling his brow. “You gotta remember the face. And your hands. I have your goddamn handprint on my shoulder, you know that! And—“

Paring the legs down to thin strips of muscle, slivers of marrow, knee caps were kinda weird though, he says, and there’s the cartilage too, right? Metacarpals in the feet, count them.

Alastair’s lessons run through his mind, one by one, and he throws away the dark cruelty, the black smoke and the horror and numbness of the pit; gives to Castiel only the intimate knowledge of the body known in a way that angels never dreamed of, and Castiel pieces them together, the lips and ears and eyes. “I thought I knew the body,” he says, “I knew the soul and I understood it—“

“You only felt it, you never dissected it,” Dean tells him, and goes on. Your hips in line with your pelvis, stomach a gentle roll, cock between your legs—he bulls on past that, thinks and tries not to think, and Cas had known him even back then, reading lines off his soul—gotta take them one at a time, he says. The way he took them apart. His mouth dries from the words. He’d sung them like a nursery rhyme, and now—

Dean says, “And the chest, the heart and lungs and ribs,” crescendo here in a syncopated beat, wonders, Is the banishing sigil gonna be there?—

—and Cas replies, “I remember the ribs, I wrote on yours—“

—Dean says, “The eye sockets, jawline”—but breaks the rhythm now, adds, “You always had a bit of stubble, guess Jimmy missed a bit while shaving—“

—Cas says, “Yes. When I saw you in Hell, even back then—“ He breaks off; then says, “You looked terrible,” but the tone of his voice is more wondering than condemning.

“Bastard,” Dean says, and snorts. “Could say the same for you—“ He reaches out blindly, waves his hand about, and slaps into skin, holding tight. He feels a vein, beating like a bird’s wings, the thin bones of the wrist. “We’ll have to hit up a place for food, okay?” he says.

Cas mumbles something, then says, “My grace—“

He feels along the wrist to the elbow, then upward. Puts his hand on Cas’s shoulder. “It’s there?” he snaps. “You’ve got it, right, it’s—“

And senses the slow shuffling tremors, scritch-scratch, then his stomach heaves up and—“Fuck,” he groans, cheek slamming down, and that’s an instant bruise.

Rain pitter-patters on his skin, a steady quiet clatter upon the ground. “Cas? Cas!”

“… It’s done,” he hears Cas say. “We’re out.” Hands upon his temples, turning his head to the side. He blinks and looks up. The face is thinner, the mouth wider, but there’s a disjointed air in the tilt of the head and a unsettling look in the eyes.

Cas still picked his eyes to be deep blue.

“Holy crap,” he says. “Dude. Like I said, _you_ look terrible.” But he grins though he tries to turn it into a smirk, and the muscles in his face stretch till they hurt. He just stares upward, his gaze tracing the nose and jaw and hairline. Fuck, it’s good to see a real familiar face. Sam, he thinks, we did it. We could do it. We could still do it.

Cas frowns, a stilted motion in its uncertainty. “True,” he says. “It’s—chilly.”

“Wait—aw, damnit,” Dean sits up so quickly he has to grab onto Cas’s arm for a moment, slippery wet and cool to the touch. “You gotta be _freezing_.” His gaze drops to Cas’s neck, then his bony shoulders—the image Castiel gave himself, how he wants to be seen. Looks further.

Cas only rubs his bare forearms unconsciously. Of course, Dean thinks, should’t’ve expected Papa to be that awesome. He shakes off his jacket and throws it at Cas. “On,” he snaps. “’Less you wanna catch a cold.”

“Dean, you’re only wearing a shirt—“

“And you’re wearing nothing, have some goddamn sense for once.”

There’s no overhang to catch the rain, which drizzles over them in a steady hum. Dean shakes himself, stands up; recognizes the narrow, dark alleyway, because he’d tried to park the Impala here but decided not to. Haloa’s somewhere down in the building over. Papa’s somewhere down there.

He slumps back down against the wall, unevenly laid bricks rasping against his shirt. Takes a deep breath, his heart leaping around twitchy and tired, and it’s just him. Just him inside. He sighs and hears the quiet settle in his mind.

“Dean.”

He blinks rapidly, closes his eyes and knocks his head back. “Yeah? What are you gonna do now?” He glances over at Cas, hidden under the jacket. What he would do now, Dean thinks. His mouth slackens; the weariness sweeps down onto him like a gale of wind, the inexorable descent. Doesn’t need to stick around anymore, I guess, he tells himself. There’s always God somewhere out there.

Castiel stares at Dean. “I don’t know.” He rotates his head around, like he’s trying out his neck. “Where should we go?”

Raindrops go dancing tango on the asphalt. Dean doesn’t answer for a long while. He bends his head down between his knees and stares at the ground, his eyes prickling, and can’t see straight. He comes back up and rubs at the corner of his eyes. “We, uh,” he says. “Where—me and you, we’ll figure something out.”

Cas keeps looking at him. His hair sticks out like it was just electrocuted. “Dean. Why are you crying?”

Dean wants to tell him it’s a fucking stupid question because it’s fucking raining, and is Cas blind or what, except his mouth’s not working and the words don’t come. But Castiel says nothing else. He reaches out and wipes Dean’s face, and his hand passes over gently, quietly, like a benediction.

*

According to Lisa, she’d nearly screamed when she opened the door the next morning. Dean had fallen asleep in the Impala, parked outside her house, so either way he wouldn’t have known.

“I didn’t want to think what might’ve happened,” she told him. “A car accident, or a hunt, or,“ she waved her hand ambiguously. “Your stuff was all gone, the car and your clothes and your guns—“

Dean sneezed. “Don’t worry,” he said. The chilly night had not been kind to him. “I just. I needed to clear my head. It’s, uh, all clear now.” He grinned weakly at her, though it faded quickly.

“You’re a fool, Dean Winchester,” Lisa said without spite, and then told him to shut up and eat his soup.

_Sorry, Cas_ , he said. _I think I destroyed your dream body. You can’t make another one?_

_It’s not easy_ , Castiel replied. _I don’t think I have the power. But it’s not your fault._

_Sorry_ , Dean said.

_Don’t. It’s not your fault._

Dean stirred his soup, watching chunks of tomato and chicken surface and sink in the mini-whirlpool he was creating. _Fuck_ , he said. _Lucifer_. He moved his fingers along the spoon handle. Pinky, ring, middle, pointer, thumb. That’s good to remember, he thought. He wasn’t dreaming, he wasn’t in Hell, but sometimes he forgot and concentrated on his body so hard that he missed the world going on around him.

_It was_. Cas paused. _Not comfortable_ , he added.

_Yeah_ , Dean said; chewed, and felt the thick, homemade broth almost clotting in his throat. _Fuck_ , he said again. The Horsemen’s rings were heavy against his collarbone, still dotted with dirt. The skin under his fingernails was scrubbed clean, no sign of his digging to bury the rings and take them again. _You. And Sam’s still down there. I made a cock-up of everything_. The worst—he didn’t know. If Sam had been there, if he had heard Dean, if he knew—I promised, he thought. I promised you I’d come to Lisa’s, and I did, but now I’m promising myself I’ll get you out, and I will. I fucking will.

_No. If that were the case, you would have continued to delude yourself into freeing a fake Sam while Lucifer could bide his time to break free_ , Castiel pointed out.

“Goddamnit, that doesn’t help!” Dean snapped, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Dean?”

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, just talking to myself.”

He heard Lisa’s soft laugh. She leaned against the door post and smiled, a little sad. “So long as it isn’t a regular habit,” she said, before passing on, and didn’t see the look on Dean’s face. _So what are you gonna do now?_ he asked. _Where are you gonna go?_

Cas said, slowly, _I—don’t think I can go anywhere. My grace is with you, and I must stay with it to keep myself alive and together._

_You’re really not shitting me, are you_ , Dean said wearily, and couldn’t find it in himself to even be surprised.

That next week was a blur. He mowed the lawn too many times, maneuvering the machine awkwardly around the corners of the yard and nearly clipping Lisa’s flower bed twice, while he debated with Castiel. _If we find God my Father could help_ , Castiel argued, to which Dean inevitably said, _Bullshit, why the fuck would he lift a finger when he hasn’t before?_ It was easy to snap at Cas and for Cas to snap back, leaving the chilly silences to sink like stones. _It’s not fair to Lisa or Ben for me to stay here for so long_ , Dean said, to which Castiel said, _Then if we could go and find—No God_ , Dean interrupted, _I’ll see if there’s anything on working this out. This is just—dude, privacy!_ And sometimes Castiel said, darkly snippy, _What would you rather have? Peace or freedom? I don’t know what you want me to do anymore._

Dean didn’t know either. _The only thing I want_ , he said, _is to get my brother out_. And to not be alone, he added silently.

Castiel was quiet for a while. Then he said, _Yes. On that we agree. I did not mean for you to think of me as your adversary_. And the pressure that had been pounding in Dean’s temples eased, and faded. No, he thought, you’ve got it all wrong. I don’t think that. Damn, I wouldn’t think that anymore. You’re better than that.

He asked, _And what do you want, Cas?_

_To make reparations._

On the last night, Lisa shooed Ben up the stairs after dinner and asked Dean to stay at the table. “I know that you’ve never told me much about what happened,” she said frankly. “You’ve been here for more than two weeks, and I trust that you’ll tell me if anything would come here, right?”

Dean stared at her. “Don’t think so,” he said. Cas added, _Yes. I already told you the cage should hold._

Lisa, bulling through life knowing what she needed and what she did not. Dean sort of envied her for it.

“Okay,” she said. She propped her elbows on the table, hands clasped under her chin. Her brow was drawn down, solemn and pensive. “In that case, I want you to give me a quick run-through of whatever’s out there, so I can deal with it and protect Ben.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Dean said. He pushed back his chair. “You can’t just go hunting like that!”

“I’m not going hunting,” Lisa said evenly. “I want to be prepared. I didn’t want to press you before, since…” She looked at him, dark eyes bright in her tanned face. “You’re more talkative now,” she said. “I don’t know what happened last week to make you change, but I’m glad. I’m not so scared anymore.”

“Scared of me?” Dean said jokingly, but it fell flat.

Lisa looked distressed. “Oh, Dean,” she said. “Not that. I was scared for you.”

Dean shifted in his seat. “Uh,” he said awkwardly, then: “Thanks.” He added, “I’ll get the journal and go over it with you. And—one more thing.”

Lisa’s eyes asked the question in lieu of words.

“I’m doing a friend a favor,” he said. “Was thinking of making a trip to Illinois, if that’s all right?”

“You don’t need to ask my permission,” Lisa said. She leaned back and crossed her arms, but the corners of her lips quirked up. “It’s good enough to know. Go do what you have to.”

-

At noon the next day he pulled out of the driveway, the car all burnished black in the sunlight, shiny chrome gleaming like quicksilver. He waved to Lisa and Ben, standing in the doorway of the house, then said, “All right, Cas, I’ll take you to Pontiac,” and pointed the Impala toward the open road as he’d always done.

He rolled the window halfway down, and did not look to his side.

*

In Palo Alto there is a particular cemetery with a particular grave. Dean’s only visited it once before, but he takes the Impala there like he knows the way by heart, turns and crazy intersections and all.

“I don’t understand why you can’t tell me where we’re going,” Cas says. He sits stiffly, his right leg partly drawn up so he can wedge his foot into the nook between the closed door and the floor of the car, and rests his right elbow on his knee, rests his chin on the upturned palm of his hand. When Dean hits bumpy asphalt, Castiel’s head jerks up and down in time with the car’s motion.

“It’ll be easier when we get there,” Dean tells him, and tries hard to keep his eyes on the road. At every red light, he looks over at Castiel; there’s a resemblance to Jimmy Novak. but with just enough off about it that it’s not the same—his hair’s a lighter tint of brown, his eyes closer together, his legs longer. Claire might do a double-take, Dean thinks, but she would never mistake him for her father. The left pinky is a little crooked—“because I nearly forgot,” Cas says, and almost looks embarrassed. He wears Dean’s borrowed flannel shirt worse than he did Jimmy’s trench coat and keeps rolling up the sleeves, halfway to his left elbow, halfway past his right one.

Cas runs his hand over the door handle, the seat cushion; fingers the soft texture of the clothes he’s wearing. “All right,” he says. “I can be patient.”

The Impala crawls to a stop at the gate, and Dean gets out without saying anything, shoves his hands into his pockets and waits for Cas. Then he walks straight in, his gait measured with the bitter knowledge of memory, and makes a right turn once. Should be here too, Sammy, he thinks. In his mind a thousand eyes blink at him, willing, waiting. You’ll get to come back sometime.

Even after half a decade, and wind and rain, the name hasn’t faded much yet.

“Jessica Moore,” Cas says. “She was—important.” He says it like a question.

“Didn’t know anything about hunting,” Dean replies. He crouches down and reaches out to trace the letters. “Wasn’t a vessel, angel or demon or monster or anything. Just a student at Stanford.” He looks up at Castiel, squinting against the sun’s rays. The light gleams around Cas’s head, and Dean almost quips, as he once did to the shade of Lucifer, And there’s your halo, angel recovery program beginning. Half-smiles, tiredly, but doesn’t.

“I see,” Cas says, but confusion still threads through his words.

“Your briefings from Heaven really sucked, you know that?” Dean stops his hand over the twinned O. “Never popped up, huh? Bunch of blabber about hunting, and me as the righteous man, and Sam with the demon blood, and playing matchmaker for my mom and dad, and. What’d you learn? Old yellow-eyed putting a girl on the ceiling? And not even her name.”

He rubs at his forehead. The flowers have wilted away, and someone left a stuffed Smurf whose color has faded with time. “Don’t know what would’ve happened,” he says. “If it’d work out, or what. But she loved Sam. She really did.”

He falls quiet. Then adds: “Sam loved her, too.”

Cas doesn’t try to say anything, no pale-hearted condolences for what has already passed into the vanishing years. Dean feels a brief, flitting touch on his shoulder, and turns his face up. Castiel’s only looking at him, eyes in shadow. “Yes,” he says. “I see.”

The shade they cast upon the gravestone creeps and changes in angle and shape with the passing minutes.

Dean straightens up. “That’s all,” he says. “So…” He keeps his gaze fixed on the horizon, doesn’t look at Cas. “Got your grace together,” he says. “What are you gonna do now?”

Cas raises his arm and curls his fingers against Dean’s collarbone, knuckles brushing bare skin; turns his hand, the rings of the Four Horsemen resting in the creases of his palm. “Death is still out there,” he replies. “Someone needs to return these to him. And Australia is nice, this time of year.”

“Fuck, that’s far,” Dean says, and bites down hard on his lip, his eyes flicking away. “God in Australia now?”

“Perhaps,” Castiel says. “At the very least, someone who could help us.”

And what’s that, Dean is about to ask, but doesn’t. Cas can move on his own now, do his own thing, go back to Heaven or hang out in Florida or what the fuck ever, and who is Dean to deny him. “Sweet,” he says instead. “You should, uh, drop by more often.”

Castiel only frowns, and steps forward. “You’re not happy,” he says.

Dean forces the ends of his mouth up, lop-sided. “Nah,” he tells Cas. “But I’m okay though. Don’t sweat it.”

“Dean,” he says softly, and now, shit, looks like Cas forgot about personal space again, his breath sliding over the bridge of Dean’s nose. “I’ll see what I can do about Sam.” And he brings his hands up, thumbs pressing into the skin at the corners of Dean’s eyes. Says, “I think there is still a way.”

“You think?” Dean mumbles, and tries not to blink. The heat twists down over, pooling behind his eyes and sliding to his cheeks, then his mouth. He has no headache, but there’s a pounding all the same.

He sucks in a sharp breath and looks off to the side, at the patch of blue sky framed between Cas’s chin and shoulder.

“Don’t be afraid, Dean,” Castiel says. “This isn’t a goodbye.”

“Then—“ Dean starts—

And ends, “Fuck it, now you’re just being a showoff,” to empty air.

He snorts, rolls his shoulders, scrubs his face and the burning tips of his ears. “Yeah,” he says to himself. “Yeah.” Looks down, and runs his hand over the top of Jess’s gravestone one last time. “Man, you and Sam,” Dean says, and quirks his mouth, and shakes his head. “You two. Totally in the same league.”

He turns, and walks away. The Impala’s waiting for him, at the foot of the hill.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ _Why’d you have to keep digging? Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?_ – from 2x20 (“What Is and What Should Never Be”).  
>  \+ _What would you rather have? Peace or freedom?_ – from 5x22 (“Swan Song”).
> 
> The end of the story, but not the end of their lives. Re: Australia, consider 5x06.


End file.
